Poster Fair participants get ready to show off their great ideas
Some of CSN’s best and brightest gathered together yesterday to show off their good ideas at the Third Annual Poster Fair.
Those ideas included science courses that help students get engaged so they stick around, gathering student feedback to make their classes better in real time rather than waiting until the semester is over, and creating a series of YouTube videos to help students figure out how to do better on all-important math placement tests.
The poster fair is part of CSN’s overall efforts to help students succeed. It’s led by the office of James McCoy, CSN’s associate vice president for academic success. The idea is to keep student success efforts at the forefront. Spreading good ideas makes them everybody’s responsibility. They also help inspire and ignite teamwork among faculty and staff, and among the students.
Faculty and administrators learn what others are doing, and what’s working well.
CSN’s Andrew Kerr says student feedback helps create better classes
Take what Andrew Kerr and his colleagues did. They instituted a system where they got nearly instant feedback from students on what was working in classes, what wasn’t, and how things could be improved. They did all this instead of waiting for the year-end evaluations because, by then, it would be too late to implement any changes these particular students asked for.
“When students feel invested in the class they’re taking they get more out of it,” said Kerr, the Planetarium director.
Or look at biology instructor Sonja Burd’s presentation, which featured data from a federally funded summer science program. After participation in the program, which generally targets under-represented groups, 84 percent said they were more likely to pursue a career in biomedical sciences, and they had a higher persistence rate, too.
Math professor Eric Hutchinson presented a project that’s just launching that’s aimed to help students do as well as they can on math placement tests. CSN has many non-traditional students, those who have been away from school for a while. Often, those students haven’t done any math more complicated than arithmetic in years. When they show up to take placement tests, without having practiced or reviewed, they can do poorly.
Math Professor Eric Hutchinson and his colleagues are helping students do better on placement testing
So, Hutchison explained, a committee put together several videos explaining to students how they can potentially improve their scores, which can save them time and money in the long run.
There were dozens of similar presentations, focusing on everything from helping students at the CSN Writing Centers to how the library’s online expansion has helped more students get the help they need.
The faculty, staff and students who attended and presented at the Poster Fair got to see many more good ideas. We expect that the best of the best will be implemented here at CSN, and everyone else will get to see those, too.