Volume XXXV, No. 17 | September 6, 2013 “Heroes” Increase the Genesis of STEM Scholars One day after a lecture/discussion on the cardiovascular system, the class took a quiz on the topic. Although all of the students did very well on the quiz, only one received a perfect score. When we started reviewing [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 16 | August 30, 2013 Marching Forward: Veterans, CLEP, and Student Success When I first started working in a college testing center in 1999, one of the first things I had to do was to become “CLEP Certified.” I had no idea what that meant exactly, but it was something [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 14 | April 26, 2013 Donated Discards: A Creative Way to Dispose of Unwanted Library Books An initiative that sends discarded books from the campus library to people who will value them is obviously a good idea. However, an administrative challenge stands between the idea and its success. Knowing what [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 13 | April 19, 2013 The Value of Distance Learning for Developmental English Students At Lone Star College–CyFair, three out of four developmental courses are offered as distance learning (DL) classes. Hybrid classes, which meet once a week with an online component or online supplements, are also offered. As we [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 12 | April 12, 2013 Adjuncts as Effective Community College Team Members Many community colleges have a large adjunct faculty to full-time faculty ratio, with adjunct faculty members teaching critical-to-retention (high-demand and/or high-failure) courses. A simple, inexpensive plan to include, prepare, develop, and recognize adjunct faculty members can remedy [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 11 | April 5, 2013 “Playing in the Mud”: Teaching Goofy (or Otherwise) Personal Research Some years ago I read a professor’s lament that teaching geological concepts had become problematic because recent students had not played enough in the mud—experience with TV and videogames had detracted from useful intuitions into the [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 10 | March 29, 2013 Dead Languages—Latin and Ancient Greek—Alive and Kicking in a Science Curriculum As a graduate student, I had to make a presentation to fulfill one of the requirements of an ecology course. I decided to talk about ethnobotany because that was my interest area, and I [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 9 | March 22, 2013 College Computers for Non-Computer Users The college population is changing dramatically. The economy and changing technology have resulted in an influx of first-time, non-traditional (adult) students whose knowledge of the computer is very limited. They might be able to find airline tickets online, for example, [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 8 | March 15, 2013 Taming the Beginning-of-the-Semester Teaching/Writing Jitters You are standing at the front of a clinically white classroom facing 25 to 30 anxious faces. You fidget. They fidget. The air is thick with the smell of new books, chalk (or dry-erase pens), freshly sharpened pencils, and expectation. [...]
Volume XXXV, No. 7 | March 1, 2013 Understanding or Memorization: Teaching that Promotes Long-Term Retention Why do we remember some lessons and forget others? Is it that some are perceived as more important, exciting, or possibly just easier to comprehend? Perhaps the answer has elements of all of those in its makeup; [...]
