The City Colleges of Chicago, in partnership with DePaul University received a grant from the Illinois Space Grant Consortium to establish a High Altitude Ballooning program for undergraduate students. In such a program, students build payloads that are launched into near space with a helium filled weather balloon. The balloons are tracked through a HAM radio network and with GPS, and are recovered roughly 2 hours after they are launched. Between Harold Washington College and DePaul, there have been more than 100 successful launches (90% of which are from DePaul). Under the guidance of Bernhard Beck-Winchatz, CCC created a program that supports students with tuition and stipends as they conduct experiments above Earth’s atmosphere. In this session, we will discuss the general process of launching, tracking, and retrieving a balloon. We will also describe the student recruitment and engagement process. With one year completed, we have learned a lot about how to support students as scientists and engineers through an open-lab and instrument building with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos.

In this breakout session, we will share our experiences in laboratory development, which centered around three principles:

1. Teaching fundamental concepts in Chemistry
2. Relating macroscopic observations to a molecular-level understanding
3. Relating chemical principles to healthcare

While the target course was a 100-level Organic and Biochemistry course, the labs we developed could be applied in a number of settings, such as General, Organic, or Biochemistry courses. First, we will share the MORE (Model-Observe-Reflect-Explain) pedagogy which we used to scaffold the labs. We will discuss the process of developing and revising the labs through the discussion of several labs in various stages of development, including using the synthesis of cyclohexene to understand equilibrium processes and a lab that models drug delivery in humans by using dialysis of dyes and albumin.

We will share with you our challenges and successes in implementing and revising the labs. We will discuss the methods we used to evaluate student work and how this analysis informs. We will discuss the types of revisions we made to the material and the resultant student outcomes. Throughout the breakout session, there will be many opportunities for group discussion. Participants will be given the opportunity to discuss topics such as: What sort of activity could be developed that has an application of interest to your students? What types of modeling are relevant for your discipline? What are some methods you have used or could use to evaluate or improve your activity?

This work is supported by NSF DUE 1431926.

Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) was developed and piloted at Ferris State University in 1993. The program fosters learning partnerships involving faculty, SLA facilitators, and students. Faculty participate on a voluntary basis and support the program design. The SLA program targets high-risk for failure courses, not students. We have found that some highly motivated and very successful students enroll in SLA courses to help ensure future success in their courses. There are no additional charges to students for participation in an SLA supported course.

SLA has data to support funding, which is why Ferris’ program continues to grow! One of the key pieces is the collaboration that occurs between the professors and the facilitators running the SLA workshops.

This interactive session will help participants learn more about what Structured Learning Assistance is and is not. Topics covered will include the history of SLA, the key features, the role of faculty, the characteristics of an effective facilitator, and the structure of a typical workshop. This presentation will focus on those features and others that make SLA effective. Quotes from faculty and students who have taken SLA supported courses and data will be shared.

In the Spring of 2014 at UIC the pass rates in algebra through calculus courses hit a low point. With the spotlight on these low pass rates the need for change became apparent.

We defined our goals to be:

• Improve student’s success rates in these courses.
• Ensure students passing a prerequisite course are well prepared for following courses.
• Reduce the number of semesters students spend taking non-credit bearing courses.

To work towards these goals, we strengthened our coordination of the courses, implemented active learning, and integrated different assessment tools. In the future we will be adding co-requisite options.

In this breakout session we will share the challenges we faced, and the changes that we implemented at UIC in the past year that led to pass rates that were 20 percentage points higher in pre-calculus and calculus than the previous year. Participants are encouraged to share the story of the challenges and innovations at their institutions.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has several programs that support undergraduate education. This presentation will discuss the four major programs in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE), strategies for writing strong grant proposals, and NSF resources available through nsf.gov. It will be followed by a question and answer period. The four DUE programs are Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE), a transformative program that improves student learning and prepares the scientific leaders of tomorrow; Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarships (Noyce), a scholarship program for STEM majors who want to become K12 teachers; Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM), a scholarship program for academically talented and financially needy students earning STEM degrees; and Advanced Technological Education (ATE), a workforce program that helps students develop skills and earn credentials to get jobs in their communities.

Potential audience members are encouraged to browse the homepage of the NSF Directorate of Education and Human Resources (EHR) for other programs of interest, especially in the NSF Division of Human Resource Development (HRD).

If you are interested in other NSF programs, please email Dr. Higgins ( thhiggin@nsf.gov ) and he will try to incorporate the material into his presentation.

EHR home page: http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=EHR

HRD home page: http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=HRD

In this breakout, there will be discussion of benefits of using real-world problems to enhance learning in mathematics. One problem for early developmental classes and one for calculus classes will be presented.

Part 1: The Calculus of Corvettes

A non-routine calculus task using data from a drag racing facility will be discussed. Participants will explore how this task provides flexible learning opportunities through mathematical modeling and data analysis to deepen students’ understanding of calculus. Hallmarks of a good problem are identified and student work will be shared.

The discussion problem is one from differential calculus. The problem is authentic, has a low entry point for engagement, yet challenges the problem solver in a multitude of ways. Natural components of this problem are average and instantaneous rates of change, data analysis and statistics, technology use, and mathematical modeling. Potential components for student growth include the conceptual meaning of the mean value theorem, local linearity, and the pedagogy of the derivative.

Part 2: Baking in Algebra, a SENCER approach in Developmental Math

We will provide a brief introduction to SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities) and its math constituent, Engaging Mathematics, two communities that are major influences and valuable resources to help make our courses more real, accessible, "useful," and civically important. Next, an example of a project on fractions, where students would encounter the math in life, will be presented, along with a discussion of purpose and worth of like problems. If there is time participants will work through the project in small groups.

A significant challenge in STEM classes, especially at the introductory level, is in connecting basic concepts covered in the classroom with current ongoing research endeavors and applications in the real world. This breakout session will focus on mechanisms by which student engagement in these classes can be enhanced and students’ learning experiences improved as a consequence. Among the presenters will be Dr. Robert Paul Malchow, who will discuss his use of a Group Project in his Introductory Biology classes at the University of Illinois at Chicago that enables students to get a close-up view of Biology concepts in action.

Participants will be given an opportunity to share innovations from their classrooms. In particular, participants are asked to share innovations that bring real-world experiences to classrooms in the Biological Sciences. In order to facilitate discussion, we ask that participants who wish to share innovations send a note to Prof. Malchow (paulmalc@uic.edu).

The expectation that most college-bound students will study calculus in high school, the financial pressures to teach more students using fewer resources, and the heightened demands from the client disciplines to do a better job of preparing their students have created a situation where we can no longer afford to simply teach calculus the way we did twenty or even ten years ago. This talk will address what these pressures mean for the mathematical community and how we can address them.

We cannot expect novices to learn easily from complex visualizations that portray our expert mental models of the molecular world, and then expect novices to just adopt them for understanding chemistry concepts. A constructivist strategy for meeting this teaching challenge will be modelled in this breakout session . An evidence-based cognitive model for how we learn from multimedia visualizations should inform our strategies for helping students to develop useful models of the molecular world. Based on this cognitive learning model we have developed and evaluated a constructivist learning design to prime the perception filter, avoid overloading the working memory, and elaborately link new ideas to prior learning. In this session you will participate as a novice in this learning design for a specific topic using VisChem animations and Odyssey simulation software, and see how both animations and simulations are required to visualize structures and processes at this level satisfactorily. The focus will be on the challenge of directing student attention to specific features in these visualizations.