Research experience is essential for the ongoing education of many students. As an instructor, you may have developed research tasks, implemented them into your course, and sought supporting personnel to ensure your students learn the essentials. CUREs, or course-based undergraduate research experiences, provide undergraduates a form of apprenticeship-style research experience.   Dolan and Weaver’s A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research offers guidance and some of the best practices on how to provide research experiences outside of the lab. One of the first things to take into account when planning to implement a CURE, is that students bring with them certain types of background knowledge and skills, and have different areas of knowledge that need to be developed. Knowing about your students skill levels should help guide the structure of the CURE, including which instruments and materials will be needed, which sections of the project will be “practice” versus novel exploration, and how much time will be devoted to each aspect of the experience. If you would prefer to adapt an existing CURE, you can choose to do so separately from other instructors who teach that CURE, or you can join a group of users implementing the CURE at multiple other institutions. Consider these existing programs: Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) at the University of Texas at Austin: https://cns.utexas.edu/fri Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters program (SEA-PHAGES): https://seaphages.org/ How do you introduce research experiences in your course? To learn more about developing and implementing CUREs, get your copy of A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research today!     ... View more

As winter break approaches and students prepare for final exams and projects, instructors are busy writing and grading those finals and discovering how well students actually understood the material. With the mix of available virtual and in-person courses, the consideration of different types of assessments becomes very complex.  Courses in STEM disciplines often cover a large amount of material that tends to encourage superficial learning instead of the more ideal deep approach to learning. Additionally, STEM courses seem to have a threatening and anxiety-provoking assessment system.  Summative assessment is the assessment of student learning; it is usually an exam, final project or report that provides a score on that student’s performance but rarely offers timely or effective feedback. But these final exams and evaluations are inherently necessary in the framework of our education system. What remains is to learn how to use summative assessment as a learning tool. Consider the ideas in the table below for your own test-taking processes. During the test Collaborative test-taking Pyramid exams Immediate feedback assessment technique Self-corrected exams Prior to return of the test Do-over After the return of the test Highlighting missed material Point-recapture Test analysis   How do you make use of summative assessments? Explore the various types of assessments and strategies for their use in Assessment in the College Classroom.   ... View more

Available for the first time with Macmillan's new online learning tool Achieve ,  Susan Karr’s Environmental Science for a Changing World 4e uses an engaging, journalistic approach.  The resources in Achieve are designed to provide opportunities for students to deepen their Environmental Science knowledge, while instructors gain insight into class performance and comprehension. NEW Decision Point Simulations A short video sets up the activity addressing the dilemma or topic from various perspectives. Students are asked to make a decision based on the information given. Students can see the environmental, economic and social impacts of their decisions. How would you use these tools to encourage active learning in your classroom?   Learn more about Achieve for Environmental Science https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/digital/achieve/environmental-science Request access to Achieve https://go.macmillanlearning.com/achieveaccessrequest.html  ... View more

Designing Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) What is a CURE Class? A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research highlights several key elements that make Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences, or CUREs, distinctive. There are some design features that are inherent to all CURES but there are also those that depend on educational and personal goals. In order to implement a CURE and achieve program goals, it is important to strategically integrate the CURE into your course.  Goals & Considerations for Designing a CURE Class There are different goals to consider when implementing a CURE. Some of the implementation insight from A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research is organized in the following table: CURE’s Overarching Goal Ideal Implementation To allow students the opportunity to dabble in research and consider it as a potential career path Early curriculum integration is recommended. Students are able to experience and learn more about different options and opportunities in research. To improve student retention Integrate the CURE in the curriculum prior to the point at which students leave.  To engage students in experiential learning Integration can be done at any point in the curriculum.    The inherent similarity among CUREs is that they involve students in research that can produce actual discoveries relevant to the stakeholders. Students should also be involved with iterative work that includes troubleshooting, problem-solving and other aspects of research. To learn more about developing and implementing CUREs, get your copy of A Guide to Course-based Undergraduate Research today! ... View more

With a new school year underway, it is important to consider and anticipate some of the potential threats to a new research student’s success. Among those threats are stereotypes that can take hold, especially in STEM fields of study.  Stereotype threat is defined in Entering Research as “the psychological experience of anxiety about performing in a way that reinforces a negative stereotype about your group”. An important step to avoiding these stereotype threats is to understand the subtle cues that make negatively stereotyped groups feel anxious or undermined. When groups of students are triggered, they experience anxiety that leads them to underperform and subsequently reinforce those negative stereotypes, creating a harmful loop.  There are many stereotypes surrounding women, racial minorities and others in academia. One of the ways to protect these groups of people from stereotype threat is to build and develop self-efficacy beliefs. However, saying that students should simply have strong beliefs in their own abilities to perform does not make it a reality. So to mitigate the negative impact of stereotype threats, a more direct approach of educating students about these threats may be necessary. Being a good role model regardless of gender, race or sex; encouraging students to have a growth view of intelligence; explaining other reasons for test anxiety; providing activities that reaffirm the student’s abilities.  How do you support your students when stereotype threats arise?  Read more about stereotype threats and other ways to help your research mentees in Entering Research: A Curriculum to Support Undergraduate & Graduate Research Trainees. ... View more

The best assessment is one that both gauges learning and engages students in learning. The first edition of Assessment in the College Science Classroom discusses two types of assessments: formative and summative. Formative assessment facilitates learning in many ways, not the least because it is iterative and provides ongoing feedback. Engaging students is challenging enough, but many effective strategies employ questioning. There are many types of formative assessments that can help engage students by requiring them to recall information from memory and apply that knowledge. See the table below for some examples of small-scale formative assessments discussed in Assessment in the College Science Classroom.     Example Intended Learning Outcome Brainstorming Students list everything they know on a given topic or in response to a question Students retrieve prior knowledge Concept Maps Students create graphical illustration with connecting arrows indicating relationships Students synthesize their understanding of complex processes or systems Immediate Response Systems (“Clickers”) Class polling systems allow anonymous responses and immediate feedback  Students retrieve information, apply new understanding and correct misconceptions Quizzes Quizzing at the beginning of class or online prior/after class Students retrieve information and apply prior knowledge to answer questions   Do you use assessments to encourage student learning?    Learn more about the different types of assessments and their potential benefits in Dirks, Wenderoth and Withers’ Assessment in the College Science Classroom. ... View more

How would your students define their relationship with math? BFFs? Casual Acquaintances? Estranged?    Whether you teach precalculus, math for liberal arts, or quantitative literacy, understanding how your intro students feel about math can set the stage to help your students develop confidence in their problem-solving abilities and an appreciation of how math affects the world around them.  Check out this exercise that Bruce Crauder, Macmillan author of Quantitiative Literacy and Preparation for Calculus, assigns to his students at Oklahoma State University.       Turn in a full-page typed essay covering the following topics: --Paragraph 1.  Introduce yourself to me What's your major? Where are you from? What are your hobbies? --Paragraph 2.  Write your math autobiography, i.e. tell me about yourself and math Do you dream in mathematical terms? Or did you part ways with math in the third grade and never look back? --Paragraph 3.  Let me know what you want to achieve in this class What will completing this class enable you to do? What do you hope to take away from this class? What can I do to help you get there?   Finding out a little bit about your students' approach the course can go a long way in helping them succeed. And who knows, maybe your students and math can be lifelong friends after all!   ... View more

When you compete at the Olympic level, every second and centimeter counts to give you an edge.  That’s why athletic gear is so important!  Looking for athletics examples and exercises in your statistics course that are a little outside of the box? Check out a sample of some of our favorite content, all about the shoes, fuel, and equipment that Olympic athletes rely on to compete at the highest level.   What other athletic gear do you think could lend a good data set to statistical analysis?  Achieve allows instructors to write their own questions, or edit pre-built questions, to incorporate any examples, skills, or exercises that work best for their class.   Want to see more? Browse more features of Achieve for Statistics, or sign up for a demo here!     ... View more

“Dive” into these Achieve for Statistics exercises from our favorite Olympic water sports. Are you and your statistics students watching this year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics? Bring examples into your classroom from swimming and diving using our Achieve homework questions with embedded data sets. We include data sets and technology how-to videos for Excel, JMP, Minitab, R, RCmdr, SPSS, TI calculators, and more!   From Kokoska's Introductory Statistics 3e, now with Achieve!   Check out more great features of Achieve for Statistics here, or sign up for a demo! ... View more

  The fastest, the highest, and the furthest. Track & Field is full of exciting events, which, beyond showcasing incredible athletic feats, also produce some great data sets for statistical analysis. What's your favorite track & field event? Check out our range of track & field questions in Achieve for Statistics to see how you can "track" the data in your own class, alongside this year's Tokyo Summer Olympics.      See more examples below or sign up for a demo to explore more features of Achieve for Statistics!   ... View more

Jenni Punt provides an overview of the immune response in the context of a SARS CoV-2 infection, including: viral life cycle, organs and tissues of the immune system, and the development of an innate and adaptive immune response.     Access On-Demand Webinar! WATCH ON-DEMAND HERE ... View more

Are you suddenly taking your General Chemistry course online because of the coronavirus? I just wanted to remind everyone that I developed daily (MWF) worksheets for General Chemistry I and II. These are available free from my website. You will need a password, which you can request by emailing me (information below). The worksheets were developed for a flipped class, but you don't have to flip your class in order to use them. The materials include: PDFs of all worksheets, editable files so you can customize the worksheets, and other goodies. The URL for the worksheets is http://johnosterhout.com/worksheets/ For my discussion of classroom flipping: http://johnosterhout.com/flipped-general-chemistry/ To get a password, email me at: JohnOsterhout<at>JohnOsterhout<dot>com. Please include a URL to you at your institution so I can verify you are a teaching professional. ... View more

Introduction. I wrote this post primarily for professors that might be considering flipping their classrooms. The tips and tricks below I developed while teaching General Chemistry to freshmen for eight years at Angelo State University. Of course, some, if not most of these tips would apply to upper division classes as well. First Tip. Bookmark Flipped Chemistry. It is a great resource for classroom flippers. First Day. Explain yourself. Most freshman students have never seen a flipped classroom. So it is a shock. Explain how it works, but as importantly, explain why you are flipping. I found that the students tolerated the approach better if they thought it would improve their grades. Tell them that the process of learning is on them, that only they can put in the effort to learn the material.  Assure them that you are there to help them and that you want them to succeed. You are there to coach them and to provide them with exercises and help. Go over their sources of help. List them explicitly: you, the book, on line tutuorials or videos from the textbook company, videos that you have produced, tutorials run by you, office hours, the tutor center, the library, the internet, Khan academy, and so forth. See my post, Hello Class. First Day Quiz. Give a them a basic math and chemistry quiz on the first day. See what you are up against. I gave a first day quiz that was about half simple math problems and half basic chemistry problems. The quiz mostly helps to identify students with math troubles (see It's That Chemistry Algebra). I once gave a more extensive chemistry quiz on the first day and tried to correlate it with final grades. There was no correlation. Gumption trumps prior knowledge. For more about what I am calling gumption see Brandon Tenn's post Developing Grit. Videos. Make the videos mandatory or not, in either case assume that the student do not watch them and plan accordingly. Alternatively, use technology to ask questions during the videos. Be sure there are points at stake and that the students can't continue without answering the questions. See my post To Video or Not to Video on my website. Before class. The important thing is to try to get the students to engage the material before coming to class. Videos might do it. Reading might do it. I assign reading and provide links to videos when I can find them. I also assign online homework before every class. Usually, the students skip the reading and go straight to the homework. If they can't work the homework, THEN they go to the book or the internet. For more about using homework in the flipped classroom, see my post Homework as Engagement. Group Worksheets. Absolutely have the students work in groups. Do not let them turn in one worksheet per group. This encourages the slackers to talk about football or relationships while the only motivated student actually does the worksheet. If everyone has a stake in the worksheet there is at least interest in finishing as many questions as possible during class. If you haven't got your own worksheets, I have posted all the worksheets I used for General Chemistry I and II on my website. Here is the link to my Flipped General Chemistry Page, which contains a description of how I flip and a link to the worksheets. You need a password for the worksheets. Send me an email at JohnOsterhout<at>JohnOsterhout<dot>com with a link to your professional page and I'll send you the password. Choosing Groups. When I first flipped my classroom, I made up groups randomly at first. After the first exam, I choose one student from each quartile of the class for each group. This was a disaster because the top student would do all the work while the others slacked off. The method I settled on was to make up the groups by major. Honors students were together, as were pre-meds and pre-dents, regardless of major. Mostly, the motivated students were in the honors/pre-med/chemistry major groups. The other groups were at least all in the same boat. Since their majors were all the same, they were having about the same experiences in their classes, and had the same motivations (mostly get through chemistry.) For more on groups, see On Groups. Homework. I have noticed that many professors using a flipped classroom still give homework as a summative exercise. Since you are essentially doing homework every day in class, it seems a better idea to use the homework daily to prepare students for the material to come and to reinforce the ideas the day after the class. See Homework as Engagement, which I alluded to earlier in the "Before Class" section. Exceptions that I make to the daily use rule are to give online homework as a review before exams and to use online homework for bonus exercises. Keep Up the Heat. Try to get the students to engage the material multiple times. I try for 1) the reading, 2) the online homework before class, 3) the daily quiz at the beginning of class, 4) the worksheets, 5) homework questions on the next days assignment about the previous days material, 6) exam reviews, and finally, 7) exams. Quizzes. Use daily quizzes at the beginning of class. The idea is to put a premium on preparation. I usually allow the students to take the quizzes as a group. Group quizzes engender discussion. I sometimes spring an individual quiz on them to encourage them to keep on top of things. The students hate the individual quizzes after they have done a few group quizzes. Worksheets. I use paper worksheets. The students work on them in groups during class and I post the answers immediately after class. They are required to turn in their worksheets the following class day corrected and complete. The get a check (100%) credit or an X (0% credit). I know some of the students copy the answers and don't think about it. However, I know from the number of mistakes that get caught that some of the students are using the worksheets to understand the material. I did not find the perfect approach. Large classes. I have been lucky in the last six years to teach classroom sections of thirty two students. If I were required to teach large classes I would consider using classroom responders to do the "worksheets". One could do a series of problems in the usual fashion or give the students a worksheet accessible on the web and let them enter answers at their own pace. I would also try to find students to serve as in-class helpers. Summary. Be interested. Be kind. Be helpful. Be fair. There is no perfect way to flip. Give it a try. Enjoy! ... View more

It's a beautiful day in the land of Flipped Chemistry. The students arrive with bright eyes and inquiring minds. They've done the reading, achieved a basic mastery of the concepts, and are now ready to polish their newly-won knowledge in their groups. I usually wake up right at that point. When I first flipped my General Chemistry class, I assigned reading and hoped for the best. I had assigned reading when I was lecturing and found that almost none of the students actually did the reading, but hope springs eternal. After all, this was the new, improved, flipped General Chemistry class. Surely the students will do the reading. Nope. Most of the the students arrived with zero preparation, zilch, nada, nothing, goose egg, squat. Here we are doing the worksheet: (Student) What's this here? (Me) That's the first thing in the reading and it's right there in bold in the book in front of you. Arrrrgh! (That was me, again. Although I do try not to say that last part out loud...) My class evolved over the next few years. Now I use online homework to elicit engagement with the material before the students arrive in class. My flipping scheme goes like this: 1) reading assignment, 2) online homework, (in class the next day) 3) group quiz on the reading assignment/homework, 4) worksheet. Repeat until we run out of semester. In my mind, the students do the reading then attempt the homework, going back to the book as needed when they work the problems. Ha! In reality, they almost universally skip the reading and dive right in to the homework. I know this from direct reports. The students tell me right out that they go straight for the homework. I've seen them in action. They open the homework, read the problem, fire up the online textbook, and scroll rapidly until an equation appears that has potential. Then they try to plug and chug. If that fails they scroll to the next equation. The process is very utilitarian. It cuts out most of the time wasted, you know, thinking. A shame, really. Is it worth having the homework at all? The first that happens in my class is a group quiz. There are usually seven problems, five from the reading/homework and two from the previous worksheet. I overhear a lot of conversations that start with "There was one like this on the homework last night." So, yeah, the homework is worthwhile. It engenders engagement in the material even if it isn't exactly the kind of engagement I was hoping for. I know that many flipped classes use videos for an introduction to the material. My experience is that student hate the long ones (45+ minutes) and will only use the short ones (six or so minutes) as a last resort. Some classes make the videos mandantory. Many of my colleagues report that enforcement is a problem. In some cases, it is possible to monitor who has opened the video but not how much of it was watched. Of course it is not possible to tell if the brain was on while the video was playing. I have talked with colleagues who are using systems in which you can post questions during the videos that have to be answered before the video can continue. Giving points for these questions motivates the students to participate and, possibly, even learn something. I am interested in what you do to engage the students and, for that matter, in how you flip. I've developed a questionnaire that I've sent to all the people who got the password for my worksheets. The returns have been interesting. I hope to post about this in the future. If you would like to participate, download the flipping questionnaire and email your answers to me at JohnOsterhout<at>JohnOsterhout<dot>com. ... View more

Merced College (3600 M St, Merced, CA, 95348) will be hosting the 2nd Annual Active Learning Conference on January 9th 2019.  This one-day conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Nika Hogan, an English professor from Pasadena City College and the National Coordinator for the Reading Apprenticeship Project through WestEd and over 10 breakout sessions to choose from.  Dr. Hogan's keynote address is: The Other E-Learning: The Empathy Gap and its Relationship to the Equity Gap In this session, I will invite participants to explore the relationship between equity gaps in higher education and empathy gaps in our culture more broadly. In recent years, empathy has emerged as an important topic of study. Brain research has revolutionized and legitimized the scientific study of how we feel, and in higher education we have become acclimated to the affective revolution, from Paul Tough’s drawing upon attachment theory to help us understand grit to Brene Brown’s assertion that empathy is the antidote to shame, and thus the great enabler of learning and innovation. It is clear that empathy is a critical discipline, a Habit of Mind, and without empathy there can be no equity. But how do you DO empathy? I will propose that the answer is simpler than we think, and perfectly within our reach as college educators. Workshops for this conference include breakouts on active learning in STEM and non-STEM classes, writing good multiple choice questions, best practices with clickers, and others!  Click on the conference webpage below for more information on the conference program, registration form and fees, and breakout session schedule and topics.  This conference includes both breakfast and a (hot) catered lunch.  Registration for this conference closes mid-December.  If you have any questions on the conference or on making travel arrangements, please send me an email at brandon.tenn (at) mccd.edu.  Hope you can make it! http://www.mccd.edu/faculty-staff/alc/index.html ... View more