Education Commons^™

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 9.0, Robert O. Duncan, Grace L. Axler-Diperte, Joseph Bisz, Christina Boyle, Devorah Kletenik, Carolyn Stallard

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning.

Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris

Publications and Research

We are excited to share our work on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (DPiH), which was published on the Humanities Commons in 2020 by the Modern Language Association after almost a decade of work. DPiH is a large-scale scholarly project that presents the stuff of teaching (syllabi, assignments, and resources) through a curated set of keywords such as “Poetry,” “Disability,” “Queer,” and “Annotation,” among many others. For each keyword, a curator or set of curators has selected and annotated ten pedagogical artifacts; created a curator’s selection statement; and presented …

The Dialectic Transformation Of Teaching And Learning In Community Colleges Through Ungrading., Grace Pai, Jennifer Corby, Nicole Kras, Dusana Podlucká, Midori Yamamura

Publications and Research

As five Andrew J. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Hu-manities Faculty Fellows in the City University of New York, we capture in this essay the dialectical experience of ungrading our community college courses with our students. Drawing on case examples of implementing un-grading in a range of courses and a thematic analysis of our students’ reflec-tion submissions of being ungraded, we argue that ungrading is an effective pedagogical tool for debunking a deficits-based, outcomes-focused perspec-tive that is pervasive in studies on and of community college students. Through various ways of building student agency, self-reflection, and feed-back into our courses, we …

How Do Graduate Students Approach College Teaching? Influences Of Professional Development, Teaching Assistantships, And Big Five Personality Traits, Elizabeth S. Che, Patricia J. Brooks, Anna M. Schwartz, Ethlyn S. Saltzman, Ronald C. Whiteman

Publications and Research

Introduction: Graduate students engage in college teaching with varied attitudes and approaches. Their teaching practices may be influenced by professional development experiences related to pedagogy, and their personality traits.

Methods: Through an online survey of graduate students teaching undergraduate courses (N = 109, 69.7% women, M age = 30 years, 59% psychology), we examined whether self-reported participation in professional development related to pedagogy, teaching assistantship (TA) experience, academic discipline (psychology vs. other), and Big Five personality traits were associated with variation in teaching practices.

Results: Participation in professional development correlated positively with years of undergraduate teaching experience and with …

Advancing Student Futures In Stem, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar, Sandie Han, Nadia Kennedy, Diana Samaroo Phd, Armando Solis

Publications and Research

This work reports a programmatic effort devoted to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM education at a Hispanic-serving undergraduate higher-education institution. Between Fall 2015 and Spring 2020, the STEM program offered comprehensive academic and financial support to ninety-four students from five STEM majors: Bachelor of Science degrees in Biomedical Informatics, Applied Chemistry, and Applied Mathematics; and Associate of Science degrees in Chemical Technology and Computer Science. The goals of the program were to: (1) support, retain and graduate academically talented low-income and underrepresented minority students in the five targeted STEM majors; (2) establish a model for a comprehensive support …

Your Discomfort Is Valid: Big Feelings And Open Pedagogy, Liz Pearce, Silvia L. Lin Hanick, Amy R. Hofer, Lori Townsend, Michaela Willi Hooper

Publications and Research

This article explores the affective reactions of 13 community college students engaged in an open pedagogy textbook creation project. The instructor and first author, a human development and family services faculty member and department chair at a community college in Oregon, received feedback from her students that the project impacted them differently than past learning experiences. Student engagement with research and the diverse personal experiences of their classmates fostered both personal challenges and growth. This article groups these experiences into themes and explores different theoretical lenses, including scaffolding (constructivism), transformative learning, threshold concepts and safe spaces/brave spaces. We discuss the …

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

“The Amount Of Labor We Do For Free” And Other Contradictions: A Collective Inquiry Into The Pedagogical Choices Of Cuny Adjunct And Graduate Student Instructors Who Taught With Free Of Charge Materials During The Year 2020, Sami Disu, Joanna Dressel, Jamila Hammami, Marianne Madoré, Conor Tomás Reed

Publications and Research

A collective of five CUNY researchers developed and conducted a survey-based study of how CUNY adjunct and graduate student faculty taught with free of charge materials during the year 2020. A total of 152 respondents filled out the survey. Four themes emerged from the analysis of their responses:

1. Adjunct and graduate student faculty who taught with free of charge materials at CUNY in 2020 were motivated by economic, logistical, and pedagogical benefits. They invested considerable amounts of time in both creating and selecting material.
2. Their pedagogical choices about learning materials were formed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the …

Passion-Driven Statistics: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience (Cure), Naomi J. Spence, Rachel Anderson, Sherryse Corrow, Susan A. Dumais, Lisa Dierker

Publications and Research

This paper describes the use of scientific practices in the Passion-Driven Statistics CURE and presents the results of surveys from the implementation of this CURE at three different colleges. Overall, students experienced positive changes in thinking and working like a scientist, personal gains related to research, and gains in research skills, attitudes and behaviors. The Passion-Driven Statistics CURE aims to equip the future STEM workforce with the data analysis skills and reasoning needed across industries.

Beyond "Bad" Cops: Historicizing And Resisting Surveillance Culture In Universities, Amy J. Wan, Lindsey Albracht

Publications and Research

In this article, we define and examine surveillance culture within US college classrooms, a logical extension of pervasive carceral and capitalist logics that underlie the US educational system, in which individual success is tied to behavior monitoring, rule following, and sorting, particularly within marginalized student populations. Reflecting anxieties about the expansion of educational access, we argue for how crisis and change have historically contributed to the
urgency and opportunity to expand surveillance culture and consider why this has continued to happen as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. We offer suggestions and alternatives to surveillance culture that have helped us …

Large Scale Open Educational Resources (Oer) Initiative In Mathematics, Alioune Khoule, Abderrazak Belkharraz Idrissi, Sandra Sze

Publications and Research

A team of LaGuardia Community College math faculty designed and launched the OER (Open Educational Resources) project in Spring 2017 to allow to take mathematics courses at zero or low textbook cost. Our first pilot phase started with 10 sections in Fall 2017 using three different OER platforms: Myopenmath, Webwork and Khanacademy. One out of the three platforms, Myopenmath used in phase 1 was selected to pilot 34 sections in Spring 2018. In Fall 2018, the OER team moved to a full-scale implementation on all remedial and gateway courses of 164 sections including Fundamentals of Algebra, Intro to Algebra, Elementary …

A Trauma-Informed Inquiry Of Covid-19’S Initial Impact On Students In Adult Education Programs In The United States, David A. Housel

Publications and Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on adult education programs throughout the world, abruptly transforming in-person instruction to distance teaching/learning. Can the lessons learned from adult students, especially related to the “digital divide,” be leveraged to enhance adult education and create more inclusive policies and practices moving forward? To grapple with this question, this exploratory qualitative study sought the insights of adult learners in the northeastern United States through an online survey of primarily open-ended questions. Through multiple rounds of coding using a trauma-informed lens, the following themes emerged: (a) anxiety and loss; (b) distractions, adjustments, and balance; …

Open Educational Resources In History: A State-Of-The-Field Essay, Katherine Tsan

Publications and Research

History practitioners are making steady progress adopting, adapting and creating open educational resources. However, most historians do not have a holistic view of the materials that exist in the open sphere due to poor discoverability and professional standards that still hamper their uptake. This state-of-the-field article discusses the challenges and opportunities of engaging with history OERs as divided into three categories: 1) textbooks and teaching modules, 2) informational websites and interactive experiences, and 3) digital tools for collaborative research. The flexibility and adaptability of these resources, afforded by their open licenses, are key points in their prospects for longevity and …

Linguistically Responsive Instruction In Corequisite Courses At Community Colleges, Heather B. Finn, Sharon Avni

Publications and Research

English Learners (ELs) attend community colleges at a greater rate than four-year schools, making community colleges primary sites of ESL education in American higher education. These institutions’ recent embrace of the corequisite structure – a pairing of a non-credit developmental course with a credit-bearing disciplinary content course in order to accelerate students’ progress in their coursework – has direct implications for ELs. As corequisites are enacted in a wide range of content areas, professors will need to attend to students’ language development in a wide range of disciplinary courses. This qualitative study applies Linguistically Responsive Instruction as a framework to …

Teaching Machine Learning For The Physical Sciences: A Summary Of Lessons Learned And Challenges, Viviana Acquaviva

Publications and Research

This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to physicists, desirable properties of pedagogical materials, such as accessibility, relevance, and likeness to real-world research problems, and give examples of components of teaching units.

Development Of An Online General Biology Open Educational Resource (Oer) Laboratory Manual, Dmitry Y. Brogun, Azure N. Faucette, Kristin Polizzotto, Farshad Tamari

Publications and Research

Currently, many academic institutions are using one or more variations of online modalities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and science educators face a unique challenge with distance-learning laboratories. Many resources to engage students in virtual, interactive laboratory activities exist, but we found that high costs and/or overlooked content left gaps for several topics typically taught in a general, introductory biology course for undergraduate biology majors (e.g., organismal biology). Additionally, resources for an online lab must be identified and curated from multiple sources, requiring intense demands on the instructors’ time. To meet this need and to overcome the financial burden of …

Engaging With Text: The Effectiveness Of Content Literacy And Active Learning Strategies In Online Introductory Accounting Courses, Rachel Raskin

Publications and Research

Language and literacy are innate to learning. The accounting language is technical and specific, and students must become literate in the discipline to be able to critically read and understand accounting text and apply their knowledge. Introductory accounting courses are typically difficult for students, who struggle to simply pass the course. Students memorize the concepts but cannot internalize the information. Lack of active reading and literacy skills hinders higher order thinking needed to solve problems. The study discussed in this paper involves two fully online introductory accounting courses where one of the courses is taught leveraging literacy strategies (experimental course) …

The Cost Of Being Black In Social Work Practicum, Nia Johnson, Paul Archibald, Anthony Estreet, Amanda Morgan

Publications and Research

The social work profession is not exempt from fueling institutional racism, which affects the provision of social work practicum education for Black social work students. This article highlights how the historical and current social cost of being Black in the United States presents itself within social work education’s signature pedagogy. Social workers who hold bachelor’s degrees in social work (BSW) are more likely to be Black than those holding master’s degrees in social work (MSW; Salsberg et al., 2017). It takes Black students longer to earn an MSW degree though they are more likely to hold a BSW while also …

Correlates Of Exam Performance In An Introductory Statistics Course: Basic Math Skills Along With Self- Reported Psychological/Behavioral And Demographic Variables, Laura A. Rabin, Anjali Krishnan, Rose Bergdoll, Joshua Fogel

Publications and Research

This study investigated whether basic mathematics skills are associated with undergraduate psychology statistics course performance while simultaneously considering self-reported psychological/behavioral and demographic variables. Participants (n = 460) completed a Math Assessment for College Students (MACS), which included questions ranging from calculating percentages to graphical interpretation. The researchers used a discriminant correspondence analysis to reveal differences in course performance evaluated as the average of three exam grades. For the variation in the average exam scores accounted for by our model, the MACS scores provided the largest contribution. Other variables associated with better exam grades included white ethnicity, non-transfer status, lower year …

Getting To Work: Information Literacy Instruction, Career Courses, And Digitally Proficient Students, Alexandra Hamlett

Publications and Research

This article discusses how following graduation, students often enter the job market unprepared to find, evaluate, and use information in the digital environment effectively. Essentially, there is a disparity between the skills students attain in college coursework, including information literacy (IL) skills, and those required in the workplace, which impacts graduates’ success as new members of the labour market. The article highlights how collaboration between a librarian and an instructor of a career centered course influenced instructional design for IL instruction in their courses. Librarians and instructors will benefit from practical examples from Guttman Community College’s innovative IL Program and …

Turning Collective Digital Stories Of The First-Year Transition To College Into A Web Of Belonging, Mery Diaz, Sandra Cheng, Karen Goodlad, Jennifer Sears, Phil Kreniske, Ashwin Satyanarayana

Publications and Research

In this article, we present lessons learned from "Our Stories," a digital writing project designed to assist students in the transition from high school to college. From the collective digital narratives of first-year and first-generation students at an urban public college, who are primarily Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), low-income, and immigrant, and who participated in a First-year Learning Communities course, we examine the challenges of becoming a college student at a public college. Further, we explore how digital writing supports community-building and influences students' transition experience, in particular, making sense of shared challenges. For these BIPOC students, …

Recruitment Of International Students Through A Synthesis Of English As A Second Language Instruction, Social Justice, And Service Learning, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Universities across the U.S. have increasingly emphasized internationalization, leading to rising numbers of international students attending U.S. institutions of higher education. However, these students tend to gravitate toward larger research-intensive universities with many other institutions seeing no increase in international student enrollments. Little is known concerning how to attract international students to regional institutions lacking name recognition. To address the above and promote internationalization through increasing the presence of students from abroad, an academic department at a regional public U.S. college used needs analysis to develop a pilot program for Japanese university students (N = 13). The program involved a …

Beyond Crisis Moments: Mediating Instructor-Student Conflict Through Anti-Racist Practice, Amy J. Wan, Christopher John Williams

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Using Phet Simulations To Improve Scientific Skills And Attitudes Of Community College Students, Rex Taibu, Lloyd Mataka, Vazgen Shekoyan

Publications and Research

In this study, conceptual and algebra-based physics students were engaged in scientific inquiry using Physics Education Technology (PhET) interactive simulations via semester-long group projects. The instructor and students used the Scientific Abilities Assessment Rubrics (SAAR) to evaluate project presentations and papers (formative assessment). The overall research project was evaluated using Lab Skills Self-Assessment (LSSA) survey (pre and post) and the post reflection survey. The Science Process Skills Inventory (SPSI) was used to analyze some of the students‟ responses to the reflection survey. Quantitative analysis of the LSSA survey showed a large effect size for both conceptual and algebra-based physics students …

Flipping The Classroom To Optimize Clinical Decision-Making In The Didactic Setting, Karen Marie Arca-Contreras

Publications and Research

Background: Deliberate inclusion of clinical decision-making nursing skills in the didactic setting will assist students in potentially making better patient care decisions. This can be optimized through use of the flipped learning andragogy. Flipped learning promotes an interactive classroom environment. It fosters teamwork and collaboration. Direct content instruction is the responsibility of students.

Objective: This cohort pilot study investigated how the flipped and nonflipped approach to teaching impacted clinical decision-making and student participation.

Methods: The Clinical Decision-Making in Nursing Scale (CDMNS) was administered to the students in the flipped classroom and the nonflipped classroom on week 1 and …

A Positive Impact During Covid-19 Pandemic: A Virtual Cataloger's Experiences, Wendy W. Tan

Publications and Research

It is well known to all catalogers of physical materials, such as: print books, rare objects, DVDs, CDs, that onsite environment is an optimal place for carrying out the job duties. Coming out of the blue, the impact of COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed this tradition to an amazing way for many catalogers of this type. In this essay, the author delineates, from her own experiences in coping with the unprecedent situation, the process of making the best use of this period while working virtually, away from the familiar second home—Hunter College Library. The surprisingly great outcome is also documented.

A Psychologist’S Perspective For Coordinating Interdisciplinary Courses, Amanda L. Almond

Publications and Research

Developing a student evaluation for interdisciplinary teaching revealed a clearer goal for interdisciplinary course assessment. This chapter summarizes how interdisciplinary course assessment is a cooperative and reflexive process. Using professional judgment and a working group of peers, interdisciplinary courses maintain their integrity through regular reviews. A reflection on experiences with team-teaching, guest lecturing, and learning-communities is also included. Best practices for interdisciplinary course maintenance and concepts of validity are applied to the debate between evaluation and assessment methods. By fostering transparency, accountability, and peer-led critiques, interdisciplinary learning objectives within courses are sustained each semester. Recognizing concerns regarding evaluation, flexible approaches …

Learning Places: Place-Based Learning In An Interdisciplinary Approach To Undergraduate Research, Jason Montgomery

Publications and Research

High-impact educational practices outlined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities give faculty a toolkit of specific practices that current research identifies as having particular effectiveness in student engagement and learning in the 21st century. Included in this list of effective practices is undergraduate research. While this high-impact educational practice is most often associated with the sciences, it has wider applicability to undergraduate learning where the methods of research can integrate synergistic strategies that further enhance student engagement and learning: place-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching. In this chapter, these two compelling approaches to higher education are presented as …

“Helping Me Learn New Things Every Day”: The Power Of Community College Students’ Writing Across Genres, Tanzina Ahmed

Publications and Research

Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how their students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. In the present article, 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letters, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they …

Impact Of Oer In Teacher Education, Denise Cummings-Clay

Publications and Research

The purpose of this research study, which employed a quantitative research design, was to determine if there was a difference in the grades achieved by students who were enrolled in an entry-level Foundations of Education course using Open Educational Resources (OER) versus the grades achieved by students who used textbooks in other course sections. The goal was to find out whether OER was of the same or higher quality as textbooks in our minority-serving higher education institution. The outcomes revealed that there was no significant difference in grades for course sections that used OER when compared to course sections that …