Schedule
8:30am to 9:30am
This research looks at the effects of using a mastery approach to chapter quizzes in D2L. Under this approach, students were able to complete an unlimited number of 12 item quizzes that are randomly generated from a test bank with the highest score counting as their grade. This research compares test scores and quiz scores of students using the mastery quizzes versus when the students had a fixed number of attempts at completing the same quiz items. Analysis of results indicate that mastery quizzes have a significant impact, but only for assessing of learning beyond the rote level.
This poster displays the steps of a model that is designed to improve the instructional performance in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program at a college in Georgia.
There were many theories that we all had to endure in graduate school: study the theory, apply the theory, and move on to the next chapter. Andragogy was one of those theories (in my theory courses, at least) that was not given proper attention nor recognized for its prospective value in today’s college classroom. Andragogy is an old buzzword that if revisited and revamped for today’s adult learner, has great potential. In my presentation, I will encourage my colleagues to revisit Knowles’ (seemingly archaic theory) and work together on how we can revitalize his framework to better meet the learning needs of adult students.
Abstract Low passing rates in Financial Accounting and Reporting (FAR) I are well known. The trend at Georgia Gwinnett College is progressing downwards also. The faculty who teach accounting are concerned about the pass rate and are considering various methods to address the problem. As a possible remedy we propose to provide students with access to an accounting tutorial software, Quantum Adaptive Learning and Assessment SoftwareSM for Accounting and to administer a proficiency test within the software. Students must pass the test with a perfect score to demonstrate their proficiency with the accounting cycle, in general, and adjusting and closing entries, specifically. Students have an unlimited number of tries to complete the task. The proficiency exam is a graded part of the course. We will use the assessment reports provided within the software to track students’ progress. We will analyze the final grade distribution in comparison to previous semesters. If we can document that the software and the proficiency exam have a positive effect on students’ grades, we may recommend that the software and the proficiency exam be a standard requirement in FAR I.
The majority of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities cam into existence after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Religious organizations built many of them with states taking over this task in later years. Passage f the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other momentous Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s designed to prohibit discriminatory conduct and “eliminate the vestiges of segregation and discrimination,” guaranteed equal rights in principle for African-Americans and other minorities. We propose to examine the effectiveness of at least one HBCU by looking at the entrance scores, exit scores, retention and graduation rates. It is our contention that upon closer examination of the data that one will find that HBCUs are much more successful in fostering teaching and learning as seen in these date. We are also proposing that we will examine other similar schools to evaluate their success rates.
Neoliberal values are dramatically impacting higher education in the United States, with a focus on running institutions as businesses and molding students into productive workers. This shift toward vocation-based skills development and away from liberal arts education has occurred even as studies demonstrate that the ability to adapt in a rapidly evolving marketplace promotes long term professional success. While neoliberalism and liberal arts education are often seen as antithetical, we show how one anthropology program has combined these values into pedagogical practice through a select subset of High Impact Practices (HIPs) to improve academic outcomes for anthropology majors. Student feedback shows that they value our approach as a positive feature of our major. This study finds that neoliberal results-based approaches and academically rigorous liberal arts education are not mutually exclusive, and in conjunction, can lead to improved student outcomes as measured by GPA in anthropology courses and student program evaluations.
Unlike traditional courses mostly offered in classrooms, service learning integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection. Since 2012, we have incorporated service learning in our classes. Initially we started a fund raising project to encourage students participate in helping the Japan Tsunami. The project turned to be very successful and students highly valued the learning experience, which encourages us to continue adopting service learning in classes. We introduce the project methods used and results achieved. Then we discuss how the service learning projects enhances academic coursework as well as improves students’ social skills, self-efficacy, and sense of social responsibility.
This presentation engages participants in a critical dialogue on the feasibility and utility of virtual simulations in higher education. Furthermore, the presenters will discuss implications for the learner, programs, and institutions. A framework to facilitate the discussions will be provided. Discussion should yield bridges and barriers, along with future considerations to enhance and aid student learning.
Studies have shown that graduating medical and physician assistant (PA) students demonstrate limited competency in the interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECGs). The authors of these studies recognize a need to improve training techniques in ECG interpretation. The purpose of this project is to determine if utilizing an ECG Perceptual Adaptive Learning Module™ (PALM) for ECG interpretation training would improve PA student ECG interpretation. The data indicates our students improved interpretation competency and timing after completing the ECG PALM. Therefore, the use of PALMs may be used to increase student mastery of medical competencies and furthermore, expanded to other disciplines.
We will present the iPhone application "Nursing Idiomatics" through a poster presentation, detailing why we developed the app and how to use it. The app was developed to help ESL students understand the various English idioms that may confuse the student as they progress through nursing school.
Along with meeting student learning outcomes, faculty are frequently asked to engage with both internal and external communities for service requirements. How can a faculty member meet performance evaluation standards and student learning outcomes while still having teaching experiences that are enriching on both a personal and professional level?
Experiential learning offers students richer experiences that are grounded in real world experiences. The opportunity also exists for faculty to enhance performance portfolios through community service and SoTL research as well as having meaningful experiences.
Experiential learning projects offer students an opportunity to help real world “clients” through hands-on learning. The positive outcomes of these projects may include the service provided to these clients, as well as the acquisition of work experience and the development of practical skills for students. Hence, the augmentation of standard classroom curricula through the inclusion of such projects can be beneficial to students and the community at large. This research explores a number of approaches to orchestrating experiential learning projects. Instructors reflect on past projects and offer guidance for the successful integration of such assignments with traditional teaching approaches.
The present paper will examine the Baddeley-Hitch Model of working memory, a short-term memory storage system critical for human cognition. It will discuss the implication of the model for teaching vocabulary in Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). It will also present process-oriented instruction as an effective model that integrates working memory training, strategies around teaching/learning vocabulary with teaching linguistic forms and pragmatic functions in a coherent approach. The aim of this paper is to provide examples of best practices in vocabulary instruction for pedagogical innovation, curriculum design and instructional implementation.
This presentation will describe several projects used in my Consumer Behavior course that involve participant observation and student self-reflection as modes of experiential learning. Settings for these transformative learning experiences are embedded in the local community and include professional sporting events and the county fair. Applying Kolb’s (1984) model of experiential learning, I will discuss how these activities correspond with the four stages of the holistic learning process and share insights regarding the effectiveness, further refinement, and future study of this pedagogical approach. I will also discuss ideas for its application to other classes, disciplines, and settings.
Transfer students experience many of the same challenges as freshmen do upon entering a new academic institution. The objectives of our “Patching the Pipeline” project are to increase the number of talented, financially-strapped students earning B.S. degrees in selected STEM disciplines; increase retention of transfer students from 34% to 75%; decrease the time-to-degree from six to four years; and challenge students to engage in high-impact practices including undergraduate research, externships, and service learning. Our project is designed to systematically investigate support mechanisms thought to remediate this difficult transition. Our results suggest methods of “patching the pipeline” for transfer student success.
9:45am to 10:45am
Research Assignment for Financial Institutions Course ABSTRACT This assignment enables students in an upper level finance course to learn the necessary techniques for doing a research project and write a scholarly article. The paper to be presented will outline all the steps undertaken in the process. Step 1: Determine an interesting, current, and relevant topic that is related to the course. Step 2: Divide the class into smaller groups or teams. Step 3: Each team gets assigned a unique peer group of data. Step 4: Team members collect data from a publicly available database online. Step 5: Data are analyzed. Step 6: Submit a written a report. Empirical results from all teams in the class will be completed, collected, and analyzed by the end of Spring semester (mid-May). It will then be compiled in a summary and a paper will be presented at the conference this Fall.
Intentional faculty mentoring is crucial for both new and experienced faculty members to ensure long-term success in their career. Such mentoring ideally includes both cross-disciplinary categories of guidance and discipline-specific categories so that newly hired faculty members make a smooth transition to the institution (and to the career itself) and more experienced faculty members receive input for the new situations they will inevitably encounter. After we equip attendees with principles gleaned from a faculty survey given at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, attendees will apply those approaches to several scenarios and discuss their results.
Military veterans are entering colleges and universities today in increasing numbers. Although the needs of this unique group of students have been documented, many colleges have not put in place the resources for supporting this group. In addition, those resources that are available lack a unifying conceptual basis for guiding these efforts. The learning theory of Adult Education, known as "Andragogy", is proposed as the needed foundation for these efforts. Session participants will be able to work in small groups to discuss hypothetical cases describing the challenges that student-veterans face and to suggestions solutions.
This current generation of students has grown up in a world of virtual communication, and is constantly “on” and connected. They embrace the digital world fearlessly for socializing and learning. Knowing this, instructors, serving as facilitators of their learning, can use open source technologies, such as blogging, as a pedagogical tool, to create opportunities for research, for building community and for enhancing their classroom experiences. Research has shown that learning improves when students are engaged as active participants in their learning environment, researching, making and sharing relevant information and consolidating new knowledge to advance specific course objectives and learning outcomes.
Keywords: Blogging, Community, Critical Thinking, Enhancing Classroom experiences, Open source tools, Student Interaction.
Does your teaching approach bring out the best in your students? Are you doing all that you can to foster your students’ engagement and maximize their performance? This interactive session will present findings from a quantitative study of MBA students and a qualitative study of nursing students, then show how the elements of trustworthiness are consistent across these disciplines and among student-faculty relationships and teams. Prior to presentation of the findings, you will rate yourself on three behavioral polarities. After the presentation, you will identify your well-developed and less-developed characteristics, then determine any less-developed characteristics you would like “to try.”
11:00am to 12:00pm
As educators, we strive to create a classroom with learning goals as a priority. Yet findings throughout the literature illustrate that in many classrooms the focus is not on learning but on academic success, with a focus on grades and competition. These extrinsic factors are often accompanied by academically dishonest behaviors. By gaining an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that increase academic dishonesty, educators can create an academic environment that can decrease the likelihood of cheating. We will discuss what characteristics of the student and what aspects of the academic environment can impact a student’s academic integrity. We will also examine how an honor system change how academic dishonesty is defined and in turn impact the likelihood of cheating. Those in attendance will learn how pedagogical choices can impact student attitudes toward academic dishonesty and can influence the incidence of cheating in one’s classroom and campus wide.
12:00pm to 1:00pm
1:00pm to 2:00pm
Student integrity is an issue for all instructors in all classes. This interactive session discusses recent student integrity literature findings, examines motivations for student cheating, presents an overview of new technologies currently available that have been designed specifically to enable and enhance student cheating, and includes a workshop session for audience members to participate and share their experiences and ideas on how to deal with these new challenges. Ideas will be summarized and shared with all participants following the session.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Retreat at Perimeter College supports faculty through individual research projects. This presentation will detail the institutional integration of SoTL and the development of Perimeter College’s SoTL retreat. This retreat supports faculty in the research process, provides support and direction on different types of teaching innovations, and impact on student learning. Session attendees will explore the opportunities for and obstacles to SoTL integration at their own institutions in small groups. Attendees and presenters will then collaboratively analyze commonalities and differences across institutions and work to create a list of best practices for integrating SoTL.
To assess how the classroom learning connects with agency based internship, a university wide platform was created such that the partners can provide feedback about student’s learning, which then was looped back to the program outcomes. This interactive session presents a process by which agency based instructors engage with students about their entire learning in the program, judge student’s projects/posters and then provide feedback about their thoughts on Student Learning Outcomes. Initial findings suggests that this feedback loop shifted their role from simply being a field instructor to that of “Accountable Partners” in teaching and learning endeavor.
The learning styles movement has been embraced by many instructors in an effort to respond to learning differences among students despite a lack of scientific evidence to support the idea. As instructors seek to help students capitalize on their individual cognitive differences, other well-researched constructs like metacognition may prove to be more useful in the classroom. In this session presenters and attendees will examine research on learning styles and metacognition, reflect on their own thinking, and share ideas for incorporating metacognition into the college classroom.
Faculty, staff and students, with or without Theatre and Dance knowledge, will be interested to discover how an internal university grant is subsidizing an entire department in their quest to ensure that every major has a SOTL community engagement experience as a teacher. The Georgia College Department of Theatre has implemented a 3-year innovative, all-inclusive program which will ensure that every Theatre Major has a meaningful, mutually beneficial community engagement experience with a community partner in which they teach the pedagogy they are learning. Discover the nuts and bolts of the program and how we assess success.
2:15pm to 3:15pm
Debates are excellent for building critical thinking skills, developing awareness of issues, and learning tolerance and civility. Debates can be utilized in most academic classes, with special application in freshmen seminar classes and those that involve sociological cause and effect, such as history, sociology, economics, philosophy, education, and political science. The pedagogy of debates as classroom lessons will be explored, then demonstrated. This session is for faculty who would like to help students think about their subject on a deeper level and appreciate points of view different from their own.
This presentation is designed to deliver best practices for engaging millennial students in progressively diverse and evolving classrooms. In an increasingly interconnected world, classroom diversity is evident through our great mix of students, and inclusion is the ability to foster an environment that allows that great mix of students to effectively learn together.
Despite a move toward interdisciplinarity to improve teaching in higher education, educators find it difficult to make connections with faculty outside their discipline (Frost & Jean, 2003). Faculty interested in interdisciplinarity often begin through shared reading practices and collegial conversations (Lattuca, 2001). This interactive presentation describes an interdisciplinary reading project designed to uncover commonalities and differences in how we approach teaching in our disciplines. The presenters outline a conceptual framework and review the literature about the disciplinary divide. Participants will reflect on their assumptions about other disciplines and engage in activities to generate ways to create their own interdisciplinary connections.
Teacher educators balance the focus of prospective elementary school teachers’ (PSTs’) learning goals by attending to both the development of their content knowledge and their exposure to instructional strategies associated with learning these content concepts. Learning to teach should include a range of educational experiences that go beyond learning through classroom discussion and individualized homework. Teacher preparation programs can expand the PSTs’ views on how to learn by encouraging collaborative problem solving that involves exchanging ideas through online discussion blog assignments. This session will report on research findings that explored 10 PSTs’ views on the benefits and challenges of collaborative problem solving by adding a virtual component to a traditional classroom setting.
3:30pm to 4:30pm
As teachers, we become storytellers. The stories we choose to tell to and about our students reveal much about who we are as teachers. These stories become a part of our identity “in terms of the narratives that teachers create to explain themselves and their teaching lives” (Beauchamp, C. & L. Thomas 2009). This session offers the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon how our narratives “manage our identity” and impact our students’ learning (Cupach & Imahori 1993). Beginning with brief clips from Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, participants will reflect on the stories they have heard and shared at the Summit and in their classrooms. Taking into consideration the stories we tell our students, colleagues, and the larger community, we will examine the purpose and power of our teaching stories.