Katie Hern and Myra Snell recently collaborated to create an article for the RP Group’s statewide newsletter Perspectives. The article argues that attrition is structurally guaranteed in long developmental sequences and presents evidence from Chabot and Los Medanos colleges that one-semester, open-access courses are a promising way to increase student completion rates in college-level English and Math. The full article is linked below.
I know there have been many questions about using the FIN Commons. I’m sorry that it took me so long to respond, but I hope this will be very useful. I have almost completed a series of training videos that you should be able to follow and get up and running using the FIN Commons. The videos that are still to come are Adding Video and Attaching Files. If there is overwhelming demand for other topics, I can cover those, too. Below is the first video, which will show you how to get into FIN Commons and change some initial settings. Once you are in to FIN Commons check out the “Getting Started” page.
As part of the Cerritos College Faculty Inquiry project (SPECC), participating faculty began a process of thinking deeply about their teaching practices within a selected developmental class. Throughout the semester, participating faculty researchers were mentored in a sequence of guided reflections by faculty outside their disciplines and experienced with SoTL. The mentors assisted the faculty researchers in both thinking through the process and articulating their thoughts in writing. The mentors worked in pairs, each pair being assigned either the math faculty researchers or the English faculty researchers. The guided reflections addressed faculty interpretation and understanding about the:
Description of Course, including a description of prerequisite knowledge, course content, students, and their satisfaction and frustration with the selected developmental course;
Teaching Methods, including a description of their class organization, assessments, assignments, and intended outcomes;
Analysis of Student Learning, including examples and their analysis of three levels of student performance; and
Planned Changes, including a description of what the faculty member plans to do differently as a result of their analysis of student performance.
adapted from, “Asking Their Own Questions: Some ESL Students Take Chare of Their Reading,” Annie Agard (Laney College)
In this presentation, Annie Agard presents a whole range of evidence gathered from her ESL classes. In this PowerPoint presentation, Agard shares many different findings from her classroom research on her ESL. class. The evidence is not only useful for ESL teachers but as a model of going public with classroom research.
The evidence covers many different kinds of methods for gathering student performance data, such as through pre/post data.
Some of her evidence is based on student attitudes and perspectives.
One of the consequences of her classroom research is the ways that she discovers “complicating evidence” from her students. One example of this is her analysis of perforamance and atittudes related to group work, where she discovered in part that some students who performed better through group work actually prefered working alone.
FIN Commons