Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons^™

An Overview Of Undergraduate Research In The Cuny Community College System, Avrom J. Caplan, Effie S. Maclachlan Phd

Publications and Research

CUNY community colleges occupy a unique niche because they are part of a larger geographically focused university system in which all faculty members are governed by a single set of standards for professional development. Research is clearly a part of the wider institutional culture, and dedicated faculty members who obtained support from state and federal funding agencies have conducted successful student-research programs. Close partnerships between community colleges and their four-year counterparts can contribute to positive student outcomes and to the subsequent transfer of students. The main roadblock to broadening participation is the small number of students who can be supported …

A Broadly Implementable Research Course In Phage Discovery And Genomics For First-Year Undergraduate Students, Tuajuanda C. Jordan, Sandra H. Burnett, Susan Carson, Steven M. Caruso, Kari Clase, Randall J. Dejong, John J. Dennehy, Dee R. Denver, David Dunbar, Sarah C. R. Elgin, Ann M. Findley, Chris R. Gissendanner, Urszula P. Golebiewska, Nancy Guild, Grant A. Hartzog, Wendy H. Grillo, Gail P. Hollowell, Lee E. Hughes, Allison Johnson, Rodney A. King, Lynn O. Lewis, Wei Li, Frank Rosenzweig, Michael R. Rubin, Margaret S. Saha, James Sandoz, Christopher D. Shaffer, Barbara Taylor, Louise Temple, Edwin Vazquez, Vassie C. Ware, Lucia P. Barker, Kevin W. Bradley, Deborah Jacobs-Sera, Welkin H. Pope, Daniel A. Russell, Steven G. Cresawn, David Lopatto, Cherly P. Bailey, Graham F. Hatfull

Publications and Research

Engaging large numbers of undergraduates in authentic scientific discovery is desirable but difficult to achieve. We have developed a general model in which faculty and teaching assistants from diverse academic institutions are trained to teach a research course for first-year undergraduate students focused on bacteriophage discovery and genomics. The course is situated within a broader scientific context aimed at understanding viral diversity, such that faculty and students are collaborators with established researchers in the field. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) course has been widely implemented and has been …

Google Vs. The Library (Part Ii): Student Search Patterns And Behaviors When Using Google And A Federated Search Tool, Helen Georgas

Publications and Research

This study examines the information-seeking behavior of undergraduate students within a research context. Student searches were recorded while the participants used Google and a library (federated) search tool to find sources (one book, two articles, and one other source of their choosing) for a selected topic. The undergraduates in this study believed themselves to be skilled researchers, but their search queries and behaviors did not support this belief. Students did not examine their topics to identify keywords and related terms. They relied heavily on the language presented to them via the list of research topics and performed natural language or …

Proceedings Of The 1st Annual Cuny Games Festival, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Francesco Crocco, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Offenholley, Leah Potter, Maura A. Smale, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 17-18, 2014, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Topics in Game Design - Teaching with Virtual and Augmented Realities - Writing with Games - Breaking the Magic Circle: Games & Real Life - Interactive Game Design (What's Your Game Plan? - Designing Ethical Games - Games and Gender - Gaming English Language and Literature - Game, Narrative, Literacy - Teaching with Games - Games, Storytelling, and Narrative - Games and STEM - Learning by Design - Students as Game Designers - Experiencing Reality in Popular Games …

Mobile Information Literacy: Supporting Students’ Research And Information Needs In A Mobile World, Stefanie Havelka

Publications and Research

Mobile devices have changed everyday life and they have had a great impact in higher education. This article describes a pilot project in which an academic librarian at Lehman College, City University of New York, taught information literacy exclusively via mobile devices. The concept of mobile information literacy is also reviewed, and its role in current and future teaching practices is evaluated. Lessons learned from this project tell us that mobile information literacy, albeit in its infancy, could play an essential part in students’ learning, and therefore academic librarians could incorporate it as part of their practice.

Brooklyn's Waterfront As A Living Laboratory, Anne E. Leonard

Publications and Research

Fellows in the college’s Living Lab seminar develop general education learning outcomes using high-impact learning practices, especially place-based learning. Capitalizing on City Tech’s greatest asset, proximity to Brooklyn’s historic post-industrial waterfront, fellows participate in a walking tour, enhanced by a mobile website on the OpenLab. As this activity is integrated into coursework, students use the site to assess their learning.

Students' Immersion Experiences In Study Abroad, Federica Goldoni

Publications and Research

Data show that a larger number of students than ever are participating in learning experiences abroad. However, such programs are not always as immersive and intensive as participants, faculty, program directors, and administrators would wish. This study examines the ways in which students created sustained opportunities to interact with members of the host community as well as episodes of cultural clash, miscommunication, and misunderstanding experienced at the intersection of two cultures that led to diminishing willingness to interact with members of the host community. The article concludes with recommendations for pre-departure experiences that are designed to help students become more …

Create Cornerstone: Introduction To Scientific Thinking, A New Course For Stem-Interested Freshmen, Demystifies Scientific Thinking Through Analysis Of Scientific Literature, Alan J. Gottesman, Sally G. Hoskins

Publications and Research

The Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment (CREATE) strategy for teaching and learning uses intensive analysis of primary literature to improve students’ critical-thinking and content integration abilities, as well as their self-rated science attitudes, understanding, and confidence. CREATE also supports maturation of undergraduates’ epistemological beliefs about science. This approach, originally tested with upper-level students, has been adapted in Introduction to Scientific Thinking, a new course for freshmen. Results fromthis course’s initial semesters indicate that freshmen in a one-semester introductory course that uses a narrowly focused set of readings to promote development of analytical …

Searching Mindfully: Are Libraries Up To The Challenge Of Competing With Google Books?, Amrita Dhawan

Publications and Research

Traditional research tools used by libraries, such as encyclopedias and catalogs (OPACs) were created in an age of print and information scarcity. They have not kept up with changes in the information world which assume an abundance of online information in different formats and interdisciplinary topics which attempt to solve ‘real world’ messy problems and not traditional theoretical questions. The traditional tools rest on an unwieldy and somewhat outdated collaboration between OCLC, LOC, private aggregators, librarians and faculty. The search results they deliver offer excessive information with very little guidance on how to systematically sift through them. This makes the …

But Are They Connected?: A Report On The Queens College Technology Survey Of The Use Of Ubiquitous Tools For Learning, Eva M. Fernández, Michelle C. Fraboni

Publications and Research

The casual observer of the student population at Queens College (an urban, public, predominantly undergraduate campus) is awed by the ubiquity of technology, offering students the ability to communicate and participate in learning anytime, anywhere. They text, email, facebook, and tweet all day long. They have nearly instant access to the digital tools that have been touted as changing teaching and learning at all levels of education. With over 80% of our population born in or after 1980, there is an assumption that these digital natives intuitively know about and prefer digital tools for learning. With this in mind, and …

Faculty As Undergraduate Research Mentors For Students Of Color: Taking Into Account The Costs, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

This article is based on the findings of a 2-year study that examined the nature of effective faculty/student undergraduate research (UR) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) relationships. The study site was a large urban public college where three fourths of all incoming freshmen receive need-based aid; and although not a historically Black college or university (HBCU), 85% are students of color. The college offers 2- and 4-year STEM degree programs. Utilizing cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as both a theoretical and methodological framework, this phenomenological study employed semistructured interviews, written surveys, and member checking to understand four paired faculty/student …

Using The Eportfolio To Complement Standardized Testing In A Healthcare Professional Program: Better Education Or More Busy Work?, Clarence Chan

Publications and Research

This article evaluates the full-scale integration of the ePortfolio into a healthcare professional program in an open admissions community college in the United States. The Physical Therapist Assistant program in question struggles to balance the dynamic tension between preparing students for a summative multiple-choice licensing examination and the continuous development of professional core values such as altruism and integrity—qualities that cannot be measured by any standardized test. To address this conflict, the program has piloted the ePortfolio as a pedagogical tool that enables students to reflect on their development of professionalism and to make connections between academics, clinical practice, and …

Program-Integrated Information Literacy (Piil) In A Hospital's Nursing Department: A Practical Model, Carlos Arguelles

Publications and Research

This article provides a systematic description of a strategy to integrate information literacy into programs that support professional development in hospitals' nursing departments. Four phases are explained: preparatory, planning, implementation, and evaluation. It suggests that librarians must go beyond the basic one-time instruction workshops to a collaborative model working with nursing management so that nurses and nursing students will use information resources as part of their learning process and obtain the needed skills to be information literate, users of evidence-based information, and life-long learners. The literature reviews the concept of informatics in nursing practice and some of the different …

Where’S The Pedagogy? The Role Of Teaching And Learning In The Digital Humanities, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

The Digital Humanities (DH) has focused narrowly on digital research methods and projects and digital publication efforts. Yet DH has also had a significant, if under recognized, impact on classroom pedagogy. This chapter evaluates the ways DH practices, embodied in a series of pedagogy projects at the City University of York (CUNY), have been used to reshape teaching and learning in college classrooms.

Dearabizing Arabia: Tracing Western Scholarship On The History Of The Arabs And Arabic Language And Script, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book is a reference book on the history of the Arabic Language and script, which goes beyond the sole discussion of technical matters. It studies objectively the evidence presented by modern-day western archeological discoveries together with the evidence presented by the indispensable scholarly work and research of past Islamic Arab civilization era. The book scrutinizes modern western theories regarding the history of the Arabs and Arabic language and script in connection with the roles played by Western Near East scholarship, religion and colonial history in the formation of current belief system, which is an essential step to study this …

The C.R.E.A.T.E. Approach To Primary Literature Shifts Undergraduates’ Self-Assessed Ability To Read And Analyze Journal Articles, Attitudes About Science, And Epistemological Beliefs, Sally G. Hoskins, David Lopatto, Leslie M. Stevens

Publications and Research

The C.R.E.A.T.E. (Consider,Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment)method uses intensive analysis of primary literature in the undergraduate classroom to demystify and humanize science. We have reported previously that the method improves students’ critical thinking and content integration abilities, while at the same time enhancing their self-reported understanding of “who does science, and why.” We report here the results of an assessment that addressed C.R.E.A.T.E. students’ attitudes about the nature of science, beliefs about learning, and confidence in their ability to read, analyze, and explain research articles. Using a Likert-style survey administered pre- and postcourse, …

Beyond Friending: Buddypress And The Social, Networked, Open-Source Classroom, Matthew K. Gold

Publications and Research

Classrooms have always been networks, of a sort, with professors and students forming an interlaced series of nodes that take shape over the course of a semester, but tools like BuddyPress and WordPress can make those networks more open, more porous, and more varied. In very useful ways, the classroom-as-social-network can help create engaging spaces for learning in which students are more connected to one another, to their professors, and to the wider world.

About Us And Not About Us: Theorizing Student Resistance To Learning About Race And Racism From Underrepresented Faculty, Eve Tuck, Karanja Keita Carroll, Michael D. Smith

Publications and Research

Three early-career scholars write across their experiences as underrepresented faculty who teach required diversity courses to future educators in a predominantly white, small, state college. The authors theorize student resistance to course material and to faculty of color teaching about race and racism in a series of tableaus of their classrooms. They examine the ways that students' tactics of avoidance, consuming the Other, and "I won't learn from you" are simultaneously ''about us and not about us," unmasking uneven assumptions about the role of diversity courses in teacher preparation programs.

The Messy Teaching Conversation: Toward A Model Of Collegial Reflection, Exchange, And Scholarship On Classroom Problems, Heidi L. Johnsen, Michelle Pacht, Phyllis E. Vanslyck, Ting Man Tsao

Publications and Research

Whether we teach in junior or senior colleges, we often represent our teaching in the best possible light, leaving little room for acknowledgment or discussion of uncertainty or errors. It seems that the only way to discuss a set back is as part of a larger narrative, one where a failure is simply a precursor to success, a way of highlighting a challenge overcome.This wall of silence about our "messes" prevents us from honestly discussing our day-to-day work in the classroom. This article models just such a "messy teaching conversation."

Learning Communities And The Future Of The Humanities, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

According to Profession's 2005 Presidential Forum, one reason for dwindling enrollment in the Humanities is lack of interdisciplinarity. Learning communities, courses clustered around a common theme and taught to the same group of students are a powerful example of a kind of interdisciplinarity that is flourishing on more than five-hundred campuses in the United States.This essay looks closely at the expanding learning community movement and its relevance to revitalizing the Humanities.

How The Presentation Of Electronic Gateway Pages Affects Research Behavior, Lisa Finder, Valdeda Dent, Brian Lym

Publications and Research

Purpose

The paper aims to provide details of a study conducted at Hunter College Libraries in fall 2005, the focus of which was how presentation of initial digital resource pages (or gateway pages) on the library's web site impacted students' subsequent steps in the research process.

Design/methodology/approach

A group of 16 students from English and History classes at Hunter College were recruited to participate after having had basic library instruction. They were given computer‐based key tasks to perform in a proctored classroom setting, using the library's homepage. A second group of students was recruited to participate in two small focus …

How To Incorporate External Activities Into Courses For Your Students’ Benefit, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Writing Intensive Courses In Theatre, Alisa Roost

Publications and Research

Most professors believe writing matters. Through writing our students are better able to synthesize ideas, communicate those ideas, and make connections across fields. While it can take significant time to grade all the assignments, it can threaten coverage of material, and our students rarely appreciate it, writing assignments can be crafted to reduce grading, add depth to coverage, and spark interest. What follows is an overview of how I incorporate writing into my theatre courses and some ways of crafting engaging writing-intensive courses.

The Face Of The Future: Engaging In Diversity At Laguardia Community College, Gail O. Mellow, Phyllis E. Vanslyck, Bret Eynon

Publications and Research

Non-traditional, first generation, college students are changing the face of higher education in the United States. More than one third of today's students are minorities, eighty percent of those are employed and attending school part-time and more than one quarter are single parents. Diversity at LaGuardia means many things besides culture, ethnicity or nationality.It also refers to age, social background, fluency in English, academic expectations, learning styles and academic preparation. We argue here that we need to rethink curriculum in relation to this new understanding of diversity.

Learning As We G(R)O(W): Strategizing The Lessons Of A Fledgling Rhetoric And Writing Studies Department, Jane Hindman

Publications and Research

Published in one of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams. The volume offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.

Repositioning Ourselves In The Contact Zone, Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Publications and Research

This essay investigates ways students respond to cultural differences and cultural conflicts presented in literary texts and considers effective pedagogical strategies for dealing with such issues in the classroom. How can we encourage an exploration of cultural issues that texts embody and critique in a way that encourages an understanding of ways values are culturally constructed?