Joanna Scheffler

Recognizing the Advantages of an Endemic Diverse Population at Mesa Community College part of Integrate:Workshops and Webinars:Broadening Access to the Earth and Environmental Sciences:Essays
Joanna Scheffler, Physical Sciences, Mesa Community College Diversity within the Physical Sciences Department at Mesa Community College (MCC) benefits from the diversity of the college population in general. We do ...

A brief consideration of the correlation of pre- and post-testing as an indicator of student success in geology classes part of SAGE 2YC:Workshops:Supporting Student Success in Geoscience at Two-year Colleges:Essays
In the last two years my classes have been part of the GARNET (Geoscience Affective Research Network) project, with which some of the participants in this SAGE workshop are familiar. In this project, students were asked to fill out an MSLQ (Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire) at the beginning and toward the end of the semesters. In addition, the students took a pre-test and post-test of general concept geologic questions. I am by no means a statistician, but MSLQ surveys have not shown much movement between the first and second runs. I had hoped the general concepts pre/post –tests would show big differences, particularly since many students missed half or more of the questions in the pre-test. With few exceptions scores did improve in post-tests, but not as much as I had hoped. This held true in the second year (2012-2013 academic year) of the study, even though I have been addressing some learning strategies directly in my classes. Primarily I have asked my students to reflect on what their goals are for the class and how they intend to achieve those, followed by later assessments of where they stand on those goals. I have discovered that even for this low stakes concepts assessment I have to resist "teaching to the test". I have also been working on making my lecture classes more inquiry-based and less lecture-based.

Supporting Minority Students at Mesa Community College part of Integrate:Program Design:Increase Diversity:Supporting Minority Students
The diversity of the student body at Mesa Community College is illustrated by these selected statistics: 56% female; 49% non-Anglo; 41% non-traditional; 31.5% non-traditional.