BIO 201, Human Anatomy & Physiology (A&P I), is a gateway course. Students learn about body structure (Anatomy) and function (Physiology) for the first time, covering enormous information. The human body is dynamic; when confronted with changes in its internal or external environments, the body systems collaborate (they don’t work in isolation) to keep its internal environment within stable working limits to maintain life.
This syllabus research project is an example of assessing learning practices to enhance learning environments at the classroom, program, and college level. I learned from student success literature that often, underrepresented students will not ask for exceptions to syllabus policies while their counterparts will, thus creating unintentional equity gaps with class syllabus policies. I studied various course syllabi from EMCC classes to see how my policies compare. I then surveyed EMCC faculty and students about the course syllabus.
Anatomy & Physiology is the foundational subject ; students learn about human body systems' structure and function. Structure and function complement each other if the structure changes it will affect the function and vise versa. The deeper understanding of the subject will help students understand the change and make connections among body systems; this is central to understand and treat the diseases. Case studies assignments help students link content knowledge to clinical application.
Peer Lead Focus and Learning Review
Monitoring student engagement and learning during class & providing feedback is tough due to lack of time. One way to do this is Peer lead learning review; it monitors engagement and provides feedback.
The class was divided into six groups of four students; one student acted as a peer leader. The peer leaders were rotated after 3 weeks, allowing each group member to act as a peer leader.
Through conversations with the tutors, a desire was discovered to be better. The tutors know their material very well but wanted to see if there was a way to improve on their delivery style and customer service. I introduced the concept of continuous quality improvement (CQI) which is a culture of never-ending improvement. The assumption is that unless we learn something about what we are doing, we are unlikely to know how to improve it.
Multiple Intelligences is a theory that students have "intelligence" in a variety of fields (artistic, mathmatic, kinestetic, verbal, etc). By allowing students to use their strengths applied in to context of the discipline (in my case Communication), students can hopefully feel more confident in their abilities and engage better with the content. This could be aplied to practically any project in any discipline.
Need: Streamline 1st 4 weeks of Differential Equations. Create clearer expectations, journal instructions, MATLAB directions, problem sets, and activities. Alleviate student confusion.
I incorporated "One Minute Paper" classroom assessment technique by K. Patricia Cross (1993) into ENG091 classroom learning during the entire semester of Fall 2017. By far, this class had the most diverse student population that was comprised of: Junior ACE (high school dual students), traditional first year underprepared students, Adult Re-entry students, and students with disability.
Statistics elicit overall student angst, which affects grades, attitude, attrition and learning. Although students attended tutoring, were allowed to re-do homework and engaged in interactive classroom experiences, PSY 230 course retention rate remained at 25%. I used a different pedagogical technique this semester - Mastery Learning - which was used successfully in K-12 grades. Rather than a traditional letter grade or percentage on assignments, students received "not yet" grades and instructor feedback. Resubmissions were accepted as many times as necessary to reach mastery.
Abstract: Research has demonstrated that a significant proportion of community college students will not persist to degree completion. Online students may be particularly at-risk. Self-efficacy, perceived value of the curriculum, and certain demographic variables have been identified as important in both retention and persistence. We will measure these variables four times during a semester in a series of online college classes.
In fall 2017, I piloted the use of single-point rubrics for certain assignements in my online ENH 245 class. Typically, a single-point rubric provides the criteria for proficiency, and then allows for feedback for how a student exceeded or failed to achieve proficiency in given areas, the goal being that the "undefined advanced column" places no limits on how students might stretch themselves" (Gonzalez, 2014).