Education Commons^™

Applying The Sir Model: Can Students Advise The Mayor Of A Small Community?, Carrin Goosen, Mark I. Nelson, Mahime Watanabe

CODEE Journal

This is an account of a modelling scenario that uses the sir epidemic model. It was used in a third year applied mathematics subject. All students were enrolled in a mathematics degree of some type. Students are presented with the results of a test carried out on 100 individuals in a community containing 3000 people. From this they determined the number of infectious and recovered individuals in the population. Given the per capita recovery rate and making a suitable assumption about the number of infectious individuals at the start of the epidemic, they then estimate the infectious contact rate and …

Pre-Calculus: Thinking Deeply About Simple Things, Jacob Carter

Graduate Research Showcase

“Pre-Calculus: Thinking Deeply About Simple Things” is a research-based creative endeavor focused on designing a high-school pre-calculus course. This course aims to foster deep, meaningful thinking, as well as an appreciation of the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the math classroom. The course leverages students’ funds of knowledge to employ culturally responsive teaching methods to connect mathematical concepts to the students’ backgrounds, interests, and real-life situations. This course also integrates social-emotional learning to create an engaging and supportive learning environment for all students. By combining Peter Liljedahl’s “Building Thinking Classroom in Mathematics” approach with problem-based learning, the course …

Assessing The Effectiveness Of A Chatbot Workshop As Experiential Teaching And Learning Tool To Engage Undergraduate Students, Kyong Jin Shim, Thomas Menkhoff, Ying Qian Teo, Clement Shi Qi Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we empirically examine and assess the effectiveness of a chatbot workshop as experiential teaching and learning tool to engage undergraduate students enrolled in an elective course “Doing Business with A.I.” in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB) at Singapore Management University. The chatbot workshop provides non-STEM students with an opportunity to acquire basic skills to build a chatbot prototype using the ‘Dialogflow’ program. The workshop and the experiential learning activity are designed to impart conversation and user-centric design know how and know why to students. A key didactical aspect which informs the design and flow …

Engaging Students Through Conversational Chatbots And Digital Content: A Climate Action Perspective., Thomas Menkhoff, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this case study, we report experiences deploying a conversational chatbot as a pre-class and post-class engagement tool for undergraduate students enrolled in sustainability-related courses aimed at educating them about the severity of climate change and the importance of climate action by offsetting one’s carbon footprint (e.g, by planting trees or mangroves in SEA). The intitiative supports the university’s sustainability efforts in general and our new sustainability major in particular aimed at helping students to achieve sustainability-related learning outcomes with reference to climate change and climate action (SDG 13), one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United …

Cold Calls To Enhance Class Participation And Student Engagement, Manoj Thulasidas, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The question whether cold calls increase student engagement in the classroom has not been conclusively answered in the literature. This study describes the automated system to implement unbiased, randomized cold calling by posing a question, allowing all students to think first and then calling on a particular student to respond. Since we already have a measure of the level of student engagement as the self-reported classparticipation entries from the students, its correlation to cold calling is also further studied. The results show that there is a statistically significant increase in the class participation reported, and therefore in student engagement, in …

“Math Talks Are Like An Alarm Clock Waking You Up”: Language’S Crucial Role In Mathematics, Gabriella M. Wasser

Journal of Practitioner Research

Whole group math talks, or number talks, are a common practice to get students talking about their own understanding of mathematical concepts. The purpose of this study was to implement math talks in small group settings to see what would happen, specifically to students’ conceptual understanding as well their general perceptions of math talks. This study took place in a fourth-grade math classroom, and math talks were implemented with the whole class for a week and then moved to small groups for the remaining three weeks of the study. During the study, a pre-and post-assessment was given, field notes were …

Engaging Students Early By Internationalizing The Undergraduate Calculus Course, Chinenye Ofodile

CODEE Journal

Today's world is global. However, despite increasing numbers and diversity of participants in Study Abroad programs, only 10% of U. S. college students get that experience. There is an ever-growing need for students to become aware of and experience other cultures, to understand why others think and act differently. Internationalization is the conscious effort, begun nearly 40 years ago, to integrate an international, intercultural, and global dimension into the purpose, functions, and delivery of post-secondary education.

Albany State University began a Global Program Initiative in the 1990s. In 2016, we extended into mathematics the curriculum innovations of this program. The …

An Intelligent Platform With Automatic Assessment And Engagement Features For Active Online Discussions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Yun-Chen Chen, Bing Tian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a universitycontext, discussion forums are mostly available in Learning and ManagementSystems (LMS) but are often ineffective in encouraging participation due topoorly designed user interface and the lack of motivating factors toparticipate. Our integrated platform with the Telegram mobile app and aweb-based forum, is capable of automatic thoughtfulness assessment of questionsand answers posted, using text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP)methodologies. We trained and applied the Random Forest algorithm to provideinstant thoughtfulness score prediction for the new posts contributed by thestudents, and prompted the students to improve on their posts, thereby invokingdeeper thinking resulting in better quality contributions. In addition, …

Student Engagement: What Is The Best Way To Motivate Students In The Secondary Classroom?, Michiah Arguello

Honors Projects

In the secondary education classroom, the question often arises: How do we engage our students? Often, we are faced with heads down on desks, glassy eyes, and students who don’t remember content taught to them the day before. How can we engage them? How can we motivate them to want to learn?

In this study, I will examine five procedures determined by educators to enhance student engagement. In each section, I will discuss the procedure, discuss what the procedure’s steps are and how to approach it, and share a way I have utilized this procedure and reflect on its effectiveness. …

Add Interactive Elements To Videos Using H5p, Benjamin Root

UNLV Best Teaching Practices Expo

To increase student engagement, video materials can include interactive components.

Inquiry Based Learning From The Learner’S Point Of View: A Teacher Candidate’S Success Story, Caroline Johnson Caswell, Derek J. Labrie

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The goal of this paper is to review current research on Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) and shed some light, from a student's perspective, on the challenges and rewards of this pedagogy. The first part of the article provides an extensive review of the literature on IBL. The second part focuses on one student's experiences in an IBL classroom.

In particular, a graduate secondary mathematics student reflects upon his experiences in a college mathematics class where the instructor implemented an Inquiry Based Learning model. His experience is validated by current research on IBL educational methodology which structures the classroom environment for …

Faculty Perceptions Of Instructional Strategies That Foster Student Engagement In Online Courses, Sharon M. Hope

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Developing online instructional strategies for increasing student engagement and success is significant locally and nationally due to growth in the online field, advances in technology, and the need for colleges to maximize student success. This study stemmed from the desire of administrators at an upstate New York private college to discover additional ways to design and deliver effective online instruction. The purpose of this qualitative instrumental case study was to discover faculty perceptions of and experiences with instructional strategies that they used to foster student engagement in online learning. Kearsley and Shneiderman's engagement theory formed the study's conceptual framework. Ten …

Acer Research Conference Proceedings (2016), Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

The focus of ACER’s Research Conference 2016 will be on what we are learning from research about ways of improving levels of STEM learning. Australia faces significant challenges in promoting improved science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning in our schools. Research Conference 2016 will showcase research into what it will take to address these challenges, which include: the decline in Australian students’ mathematical and scientific ‘literacy’; the decline in STEM study in senior school; a shortage of highly qualified STEM subject teachers, and curriculum challenges. You will hear from researchers who work with teachers to engage students in studying …

Phys 231: Electric And Electronic Circuits—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Xiaoshan Xu

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

In this portfolio, I employed a backward design teaching approach on the course PHY231 (Electric and Electronic circuit). I first decide the course objectives and choose the teaching strategies and activities emphasizing student engagement and feedbacks. The effectiveness of the teaching strategies and activities are assessed throughout the course; the adjustments are made accordingly. The results are analyzed at the end of the semester. The assessments indicate that the course objectives are fundamentally achieved and the teaching strategies are effective.

The objectives of the course are:

1. Students will reinforce their understanding in electricity and magnetism.
2. Students will learn theory of …

Online Resource Platform For Mathematics Education, Marisa Llorens, Edmund Nevin, Eileen Mageean

Conference papers

Engineering education is facing many challenges: a decline in core mathematical skills; lowering entry requirements; and the diversity of the student cohort. One approach to confronting these challenges is to make subject content appropriate to the communication styles of today’s student. To achieve this, a pedagogical shift from the traditional hierarchical approach to learning to one that embraces the use of technology as a tool to enhance the student learning experience is required. By including the student as co-creator of course content, a greater sense of engagement is achieved and a change to one where students become agents of their …

Modeling Student Engagement In The Classroom, Sarah Painter

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Connections to Community is a multi-institutional study that looks at the influence of community on post-secondary, science and engineering students and their engagement in academic activity. This paper focuses specifically on student engagement within the classroom as a follow-up to a previous paper by Wendy Hoffman, Identifying Influential Variables of Student Academic Engagement (Hoffman, 2013). The goal of this work is to model student engagement in the classroom using classroom observation data that has been cleaned and then compare the results with those found in Hoffman’s paper which used pre-cleaning data. The cleaned data is used to create two data …

Work In Progress: Online Resource Platform For Mathematics Education, Marisa Llorens, Edmund Nevin, Eileen Mageean

Conference papers

Mathematics is intrinsic to engineering and as such plays an integral role in the education of engineers. New challenges are being faced in higher education particularly in the areas of student motivation, engagement and attainment. As a result mathematics is often the focus of engineering education research. Traditional methods of delivery such as lectures and tutorials need to evolve to counter these challenges with new pedagogical approaches explored including the use of new technologies. Today’s students are immersed in an increasingly technological world and are willing to adapt to new technological advances. This paper describes a study being undertaken in …

Geol 106: Environmental Geology—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Benchmark Portfolio, Leilani Arthurs

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

The Peer Review of Teaching (PRT) program provides faculty members the environment, support, structure, and time to carefully think about how they teach a particular course. PRT benchmark portfolios are prepared as a part of this program to assist faculty members in reflecting on and documenting their instructional practices and the potential impact they have on student learning.

This benchmark portfolio targets the Spring 2013 semester of GEOL 106: Environmental Geology. It documents the course objectives that provided the foundation for the instructional approach, the course-level learning goals that defined what students should be able to do by the end …

Exploring German And American Modes Of Pedagogical And Institutional Sustainability: Forging A Way Into The Future, Lindon N. Pronto

Pitzer Senior Theses

Rooted deep in Germany's past is its modern socio-political grounding for environmental respect and sustainability. This translates into individual and collective action and extends equally to the economic and policy realm as it does to educational institutions. This thesis evaluates research conducted in Germany with a view to what best approaches are transferable to the United States liberal arts setting. Furthermore, exemplary American models of institutional sustainability and environmental education are explored and combined with those from abroad to produce a blueprint and action plan fitting for the American college and university.