Education Commons^™

Prop Demonstrations In Biology Lectures Facilitate Student Learning And Performance, Farshad Tamari, Kevin M. Bonney, Kristin Polizzotto

Publications and Research

Science students can benefit from visual aids. In biology lectures, visual aids are usually limited to tables, figures, and PowerPoint presentations. In this IRB-approved study, we examined the effectiveness of the use of five prop demonstrations, three of which are at the intersection of biology and chemistry, in three community college biology courses. We hypothesized that students’ performance on test questions is enhanced by the use of prop demonstrations. Consistent with our hypothesis, we showed that students learn more effectively and perform better on questions that relate to demonstrations than on questions related to lessons that do not have a …

Collecting & Infusing Locally Relevant Video To Support Teacher Learning, Aliex Ross, Jeanne Peloso, Nancy Dubetz, Laura H. Baecher, Leslie Lieman, Naliza Sadik

Publications and Research

Context: Although online teaching videos are easy to find, few demonstrate locally relevant models for our aspiring teachers. Lehman College School of Education began a project in Fall 2014 to collect locally relevant video of teaching and student learning to demonstrate key practices in the field. We identified classrooms of highly competent program graduates as well as Professional Development Network Schools (PDS) teachers working in classrooms with co-teaching models and/or work with English Language Learners. 6 teachers and 2 literacy coaches from our Bronx public school PDS classrooms welcomed us to videotape teaching and student learning. Teachers and Lehman College …

Lessons Learned From Lesson Study: Focusing On Differentiation For Ells And Students With Special Needs, Anne Marie Marshall, Khalilah Arrington

Publications and Research

This poster will present an overview of the lesson study process within the MATH-UP program. The poster will summarize the components of lesson study and highlight candidate learning from the process. Specifically, the lesson study selected will demonstrate evidence of candidate learning about emergent bilinguals.

Xenopus! Spiraling Scientific Journal Articles With High School Science English Language Learners, Gillian Bayne, Cristie Peralta

Publications and Research

This poster describes a journal article that is geared specifically towards assisting science teachers as they create lessons that are specifically focused toward ELLs. The article involves reading and analyzing scientific primary sources with ELLs, a challenge not only specific to ELLs but commonly experienced by all students. This article will be submitted to The Science Teacher journal.

Collaborative Curriculum Revision Project: Documentarian's Report, Anastasia Chiu

Publications and Research

The fourth series of Collaborative Curriculum Revision Project workshops, created by the DOE/CUNY Library Collaborative and project managed by Graduate NYC, took place in spring 2015. It comprised five professional development workshop sessions held in March at Graduate NYC’s/CUNY Central Office in Downtown Brooklyn. Faculty and librarians from the New York City College of Technology and Sunset Park High School gathered, developed a shared collection of teaching strategies for preparing students for the college experience, and revised a high school earth science curricular unit. To inform revisions to the high school curricular unit, participants engaged in conversations on common teaching …

Collaborative Power: Graduate Students Creating And Implementing Faculty Development Workshops On Multilingual Writing, Brooke R. Schreiber, Dorothy Worden, Eunjeong Lee

Publications and Research

A description of how a group of graduate students was able to coordinate institutional resources and connections to put on faculty development sessions for working with multilingual writers (often called ESL students) across the curriculum.

Infusing Locally Relevant Video To Support Teacher Learning, Leslie Lieman, Aliex Ross, Jeanne Peloso, Nancy Cubetz, Laura Baecher

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Improving Motivation, Engagement And Differentiation In Lesson Development Using An Interactive White Board, Jenelle Fiori, Leslie Lieman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

In Her Own Words: Make A (Mission) Statement, Diana V. Macri

Publications and Research

Creating a personal mission statement will allow faculty to remain focused on what their core purpose is. Remaining focused on this purpose will facilitate career growth and personal happiness.

Academic Service Learning Benefits Diverse, Urban Community College Students, Sharon S. Ellerton, Cristina Di Meo, Josephine Pantaleo, Arlene Kemmerer, Mary Bandziukas, Michael Bradley

Publications and Research

Urban community college students are a vulnerable population, often carrying one or more risk factors that predict they will not graduate or transfer to a four-year institution. This article presents evidence that academic service learning can provide support for urban community college students, increasing retention and providing multiple positive benefits. After participating in service learning, urban community college students report increased confidence in their ability to learn and apply course content knowledge, general education knowledge, and workplace skills as well as an interest in civic engagement.

A Librarian’S Genealogical Study To Outreach For Ethnic Populations, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao

Publications and Research

Chinese Americans searched for their identities and strove for achievement in the United States. Respect for the elders is considered as one of the outstanding virtues of Chinese culture. The importance of this trait is underscored via its record-keeping traditions and clan genealogies called Jiapu which was fostered by centuries of Confucian philosophy. Some of the history of Chinese in America can in fact be found not only in China but also internationally around the globe. In this paper, the author will share her experiences and ideas on building and enhancing family history research through understanding the major components in …

K-12 Moocs Must Address Equity, Norman Eng

Publications and Research

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the new wave of distance education offered by elite institutions like Harvard and MIT, are moving into high schools, and—contrary to what many think—that could be a problem.

A Quantitative Analysis Of The Relationship Between An Online Homework System And Student Achievement In Pre-Calculus, Parisa Babaali, Lidia Gonzalez

Publications and Research

Supporting student success in entry-level mathematics courses at the undergraduate level has and continues to be a challenge. Recently we have seen an increased reliance on technological supports including software to supplement more traditional in-class instruction. In this paper, we explore the effects on student performance of the use of a computer software program to supplement instruction in an entry-level mathematics course at the undergraduate level, specifically, a pre-calculus course. Relying on data from multiple sections of the course over various semesters, we compare student performance in those classes utilizing the software against those in which it was not used. …

Tradición Y Actualidad En La Enseñanza De La Escritura Académica En El Entorno Europeo (Reseña De Rethinking Academic Writing Pedagogy For The European University), David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Open Digital Pedagogy = Critical Pedagogy, Jody R. Rosen, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Grown Unschoolers’ Evaluations Of Their Unschooling Experiences: Report I On A Survey Of 75 Unschooled Adults, Peter Gray, Gina Riley

Publications and Research

Seventy-five adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, responded to a survey about their experiences. Their responses indicated that their parents generally played supportive, not directive roles in their education and played bigger supportive roles for those who started their unschooling early than for those who started later. The great majority of respondents reported that they were very happy with their unschooling. Nearly all of them valued the freedom it gave them to pursue their own interests in their own ways, and many reported that unschooling …

Campuses Struggling With Mental Health Issues, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dominican Blue Book, Cuny Dominican Studies Institute, The City College Of New York

Publications and Research

The Dominican Blue Book features twenty-two outstanding and accomplished professionals with degrees from CUNY, the largest public urban institution of higher education in the United States, from which over forty-thousand people of Dominican descent have graduated at the time of the writing (2015). The present rendition of the Dominican Blue Book is an expression both of pride in the accomplishments of the Dominican people and of gratitude to the CUNY system, with hope and confidence that this mutually fulfilling relationship will continue.

“To See How Far I Can Go”: Benefits Of “Fun” In Encouraging Civic Engagement And Building Self-Efficacy Among New York Community College Students, Paul Naish

Publications and Research

Community Days, an innovative initiative to foster community service and civic engagement at the City University of New York’s new Guttman Community College, encourages students to perform volunteer work around the city. What makes the program unique are opportunities for students to take self-directed excursions and enjoy free resources in the city—activities not usually associated with service-learning. Including a component that the students identify as “Fun Day” in a program dedicated to volunteer service strengthens the program and increases the enthusiasm of the participants. This essay examines reflections completed by the students after participating in Community Days, considering their initial …

Creating An Effective Model For Digital Storytelling In The Esl Writing Class, Mary Sepp, Shoba Bandi-Rao

Publications and Research

Using technology in the classroom is no longer the exception but the rule in most college classrooms. Now the question is not whether to use technology, but which technology to use. Among recent innovations is digital storytelling, a multimodal tool that can be used across disciplines. This paper reports on a pilot study designed to determine the feasibility and pedagogical value of using digital storytelling in an ESL writing course at an urban community college. The report documents a detailed plan for implementation and some of the challenges this process presents.

Creating An Effective Model For Digital Storytelling In The Esl Writing Class, Mary Sepp, Shoba Bandi-Rao

Publications and Research

Using technology in the classroom is no longer the exception but the rule in most college classrooms. Now the question is not whether to use technology, but which technology to use. Among recent innovations is digital storytelling, a multimodal tool that can be used across disciplines. This paper reports on a pilot study designed to determine the feasibility and pedagogical value of using digital storytelling in an ESL writing course at an urban community college. The report documents a detailed plan for implementation and some of the challenges this process presents.

Re-Conceptualizing Developmental Areas Of Assessment For Screening, Eligibility Determination And Program Planning In Early Intervention, Bonnie Keilty, Patricia M. Blasco, Serra Acar

Publications and Research

Contemporary recommended practices in early childhood assessment strive to gain a holistic picture of child learning and development to inform screening, eligibility, and program planning decisions. These practices have traditionally focused on competencies reflected in developmental domains with limited attention to the approaches-tolearning used to acquire those competencies. In this article, we call for the examination of early childhood constructs that impact a child’s ability to learn and develop, such as executive function (EF), mastery motivation, self-regulation and selfdetermination, specifically in the infant-toddler period. With EF defined as a wide range of central control processes in the brain that link …

Capstone Interdisciplinary Team Project: A Requirement For The Ms In Sustainability Degree, Latif M. Jiji, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, George A. Smith

Publications and Research

Purpose – This paper aims to describe experience gained with a required six-credit year-long course, the Capstone Interdisciplinary Team Project, a key component of the Master of Science (MS) in Sustainability degree at the City College of New York. A common feature of sustainability problems is their interdisciplinary nature. Solutions to sustainability problems often require professionals with different training and backgrounds to work as a team. A sustainability curriculum should provide students with the skills needed to competently participate in an interdisciplinary team.

Design/methodology/approach – Instructors drawn from different departments and divisions of the college developed a pool of sustainability-focused …

Burnout Does Not Help Predict Depression In French Schoolteachers, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

Objectives: Burnout has been viewed as a phase in the development of depression. However, supportive research is scarce. We examined whether burnout predicted depression among French school teachers.

Methods: We conducted a 2-wave, 21-month study involving 627 teachers (73% female) working in French primary and secondary schools. Burnout was assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventory and depression with the 9-item depression module of the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). The PHQ-9 grades depressive symptom severity and provides a provisional diagnosis of major depression. Depression was treated both as a continuous and categorical variable using linear and logistic regression analyses. We controlled …

In Pursuit Of Peace: A Qualitative Study On Subjectification And Peaceful Co-Existence In Four Elementary School Classrooms, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

This paper presents qualitative data gleaned from four New York City elementary classrooms and focuses on how teachers attempt, each in their own distinct way, to create educational cultures of peace. Here, classroom vignettes are reconstructed from two months of observational and interview data with attention to how teacher beliefs on peaceful co-existence manifest in the playing field of a child's subject formation. Drawing from Judith Butler's concept of subjectification, this study asks: what conditions of possibility do teachers conceive of when thinking about peace in their classrooms? Findings show that teachers create conditions that emerge from their particular theories …

Fully Embedded: An Esl-Library Partnership, Barbara Bonous-Smit

Publications and Research

Slides from a presentation at the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), January 15, 2015 at Baruch College, CUNY, Vertical Campus

Research has proven the importance of developing academic and information literacy skills of ELLs (English language learners) in basic reading and writing courses in order to promote student engagement and perseverance. A recent innovation and effective approach in academic library instruction, embedded librarians provide personal, targeted assistance to the class as a whole and to individual students. Hence, there is more sustained learning. In this session, the author will discuss the close partnership and collaboration between a fully embedded …

Can Group Discussions And Individualized Assignments Help More Students Succeed In Developmental Mathematics?, Reem Jaafar

Publications and Research

Students taking developmental mathematics courses resist attempting word problems when they are presented to them. Although word problems can help students contextualize learning, develop better understanding of the concepts and apply world knowledge, they constitute an impediment to students’ progress in developmental mathematics courses. A two-semester study on the first developmental mathematics course at LaGuardia Community College shows that students perform better at word problems when they have been discussed in groups with their peers prior to the homework. Moreover, when assigned word problems without a class discussion, students perform better when these problems are individualized based on their areas …

Curriculum Integration: The Experience Of Three Founding Faculty At A New Community College, Nicole Saint-Louis, Karla Fuller, Naveen Seth

Publications and Research

This article explores the design and implementation of the curriculum for City Seminar, an integrated course in the first-year experience at a new community college. This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical issue that provides content and context for quantitative reasoning (QR), reading, and writing (RW) to strengthen students’ developmental skills. This integrated curriculum is taught in a learning community. Its goals include greater information retention, better transfer of knowledge and developmental skills-building while students earn college credit. These tie in with the College’s overarching goals of improving retention and graduation rates. Early results from this curriculum are encouraging.

It’S Time To Discuss Race Relations On Campuses, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Why So Many Are Leaving Higher Education, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.