Welcome everyone!

Thank you for taking time to watch our video and learn about our project!

This project started in October 2019 with the goal of increasing the number of students who transfer to biology majors offered at four year universities. 

We just recently finished preparing supplemental materials in College Algebra and Trigonometry for biology majors. The goal is to contextualize math for biology majors that may result in higher retention in the math classes. We also offer academic success workshops where students learn math in a group with support of a facilitator. 

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1832348

This is the link to the supplemental materials: http://www.lamission.edu/Life-Sciences/NSF-Awards/Supplemental-Materials.aspx

Hi Parvaneh,

     Thank you for the wonderful addition to college math preparation.  This is especially essential for underrepresented groups in Biology and community colleges; many students see math not as just a barrier to STEM career options, but also as a barrier to finishing their education, in general.

•  What were the results you received regarding success rates and retention rates versus students who didn't enroll in the program?

• What were the criteria for selecting students to be a part of the program?  Were there similar efforts made to support students who required developmental math courses?

• Certainly having facilitators and tutors that are of similar age (within a range) to the student population is helpful, but did you find any success differences based upon the age of the facilitator? (this would be encouraging for environments that could not find student-facilitators)

• Did you experience any particular complications with students who were non-native English speakers (English Learners or Emerging Multilinguals)? What levels of support existed for them?

     Thank you again!

It is a good idea to have a TA walking in large class to answer questions of students. The question that I have is how  can the TA and Student conversation not interfere the ongoing instruction? Or the TA only helps  when the instructors stops teaching. 

Thanks for sharing this interesting project! It seems a number of learning theories such as group learning, and peer tutoring embedded in this project. With the difficulty of mathematics for many students, I am hopeful this project or intervention (i.e., weekly math workshop) can realize its goals that are to “increase the persistence, success, retention rates, and transfer rates of biology majors”.

I assume there is an evaluation component built in this project. Could you share more information in that regard? Is it a within-group design with the intervention group only or there is going be a control group in the evaluation? If you are considering a control group, how is it identified? How are you going to operationalize and measure the outcomes such as persistence and success? Thanks!

Hi Feng,

Thank you for your comments! 

The control group will be students who are in the same math classes but not attending the workshops. We will try to match by age, ethnic background, GPA, and some other factors that our researchers have chosen. We are still in process of gathering data and hopefully as soon as we have more students participating in the workshops we will conduct an analysis. We also have to consider the online workshops now due to COVID-19 pandemic. We have been offering the workshops synchronously online every Friday. We have to review the data before doing the analysis.

Thanks again for the interesting question!

Par

Hi, Parvaneh, thanks for your response. This makes sense. Hong 

Thanks for your video--this looks like a great program. One of the barriers we've found with having students transfer to 4-year colleges is that not all such colleges supports for transfer students. Are you working with nearby 4-year colleges to ease your students' transitions?

Hi Wendy,

Thanks for your question!

Excellent point! We have increased our communication with 4-year universities. We need to organize more events for students to get to know the representatives from the 4-year universities. 

Thanks again,

Par

Great concept! This is something that we regularly discuss at our University. We have tutors available, but they are not mandatory and likely not as effective as they could be. I think developing a collaboration between the bio and math faculty to create these supplemental lessons is a great idea!

How did you support your faculty to develop the supplemental material?

Thanks Sarah! The project is supported by NSF HSI. We were able to support the faculty through the grant.

Wonderful showcase of your work with students! Thank you.

That community formation can make all the difference. Keep up the amazing work!

This is a great project! Thank you for sharing your video and resources. Community College students in my project are tutoring middle and high school students in math to help better prepare them for STEM careers. Your project gave me some ideas on ways to make that tutoring more engaging.

This is a great project and you are doing important work! How has on-boarding mathematics faculty to the program gone? I'm curious about the structures that are in place to really integrate these practices across their calculus and calculus courses. 

Can you share a little about the broader impacts in institutional change that are part of this project? 

The Math faculty have been on board from the beginning. In fact, my Co-PI is a math faculty. The focus of this project is college algebra and trigonometry. We are planning to keep track of the students in the next semesters and see how the students perform in the calculus classes. 

We did a winter math academy and are planning to do a summer academy as well. This will have a huge impact on our STEM students who are academically not very well prepared in Math. 

I hope to report great outcomes next year.

Thanks again!

Great work that impacts on multiple levels.  Can you expound more on the supplemental workshop materials.  How they are developed?  If there is a common pedagogical approach to them? Their delivery? How they complement learning? Improve proficiency (be design)? How they contribute to collaboration?