A View of InTeGrate Materials through the Lens of a Community College Student Tutor

Friday 3:00pm-4:00pm Student Union: Ballroom B
Poster Session Part of Friday Session

Author

Luke Baker, El Paso Community College
In the fall 2016 semester I served as a tutor and laboratory assistant for El Paso Community College professor Russell Smith who used units 1-4 of the "Living on the Edge" InTeGrate module for laboratories in his Earth Science 1 course. Thus I have a unique perspective on the materials that the students and I found particularly helpful or challenging. Overall, the students found the InTeGrate materials fun and interesting. Some students had difficulty with learning to read graphical information, while others had problems with the fact that some thought was required to answer questions, rather than looking up the answers in their books. I did note some interesting misconceptions such as the fact some students equated lower population densities with higher earthquake hazard because they felt that in regions of higher population density buildings would be better constructed. In some labs the instructor attempted to combine InTeGrate materials with topics from an in-house laboratory manual. In these cases, the students appeared to be more confused about material from the manual than with material from the InTeGrate units which was generally better organized and more goal oriented. I found the Google Earth based InTeGrate materials especially appealing to me since I have Asperger's syndrome and am a visual learner. Other students I tutored that had disabilities also found the InTeGrate materials easier to use and understand than the laboratory manual based exercises.