There are many active learning activities that can be included in redesigned courses. These activities can range from small activities like online or in-class quizzes, exam wrappers, automatically graded online homework assignments, or group work, or medium level activities like one or two new lab activities (in a lab course), increased number of exams, redesigned worksheets or standardized slide presentations, to large scale redesign of a course like a complete overhaul of all lab activities in a lab course.
Your course redesign is up to you, the Redesign Team. There are many ideas and options in the literature that have been tested in each discipline that you can find, but the HSI-STEM Team is also collecting lists of activities and the Director of Course Redesign, Sabrina Avila, can help you work out what activities you want to implement in the course you are redesigning.
Peer mentors can be used in class in a variety of ways. In Biology, Chemistry and Environmental Science lab courses, peer mentors walk around the class during student activities, helping students with their work, answering questions and helping guide students to understanding the learning goals of the particular lab by asking probing questions and helping students make connections between lecture materials and the current activities. In Chemistry recitation sections, peer mentors help students during group work. In Math classes, students walk around the room during in-class problem solving times and help guide students work through problems.
These are not the ONLY ways that peer mentors can participate in redesigned treatment sections, these are just the more common things that they do in class.
The HSI-STEM team has a number of members who specialize in different parts of the grant. Jennifer Valad is the team's Lead Coordinator and is the Director of Learning Collectives. Sabrina Avila is the Director of Course Redesign, Dr. Patrick Johnson is the Senior Researcher in charge of Articulation Agreements, and Dr. Corinna Singleman is the Director of Communications and Special Projects.
Sabrina Avila - Director of Redesign
Help redesign faculty develop appropriate redesign activities
Help redesign faculty identify possible modifications for the next semester
Patrick Johnson - Senior Researcher in charge of Articulation Agreements
Articulation questions between campuses
Corinna Singleman - Director of Communications and Special Projects
Peer Mentor scheduling and communications
Jennifer Valad - Lead Coordinator and Director of Learning Collectives
Peer Mentor hiring
Placement of Peers into RCT assigned Treatment sections
The HSI-STEM team has a number of members who specialize in different parts of the grant. We each have previous or have fostered close working relationships with faculty members in different disciplines.
The Point Person on the HSI-STEM redesign team for each department will be responsible for the following activities:
Compile & organize redesign activities (compared with control activities) each semester for each class
Communicate to Redesign Faculty the RCT assignments and request they send assignments to Implementation Faculty
Contact Implementation Faculty at beginning of semester with RCT reminder
Contact Redesign Faculty through semester for implementation updates
Implementation Surveys
Organize debriefing after the semester with redesign faculty and implementation faculty to have open discourse about activities that did and didn’t work from the instructor’s POV
Below find the point person for your discipline:
QCC
Biology - Patrick Johnson
Chemistry - Patrick Johnson
Geology - Sabrina Avila
Math - Sabrina Avila
QC
Biology - Corinna Singleman
Chemistry - Sabrina Avila
Geology - Jennifer Valad
Math - Sabrina Avila
Physics - Sabrina Avila
Psychology - Jennifer Valad