Many students and educators were skeptical when colleges switched to remote learning to cope with the pandemic last spring. Aftera year of familiarity and upgraded technology, the use of Zoom in the classroom has helped our department achieve results that exceeded our expectations.Thanks to the investment in large-screen monitors, ceiling cameras and better wireless connections, the use of Zoom has resulted in excellent student engagement, high retention, and a robust lab experience. Our hybrid classes have been conducted from the classroom, with part of the student body attending in-person (using social distance) and others attending by Zoom. The chemistry and anatomy labs fulfilled the traditional lab activities by partnering the classroom and the zoom students. This presentation will review the factors contributing to success at our institution and whether they can be replicated at other colleges.

STEM faculty at Harold Washington College (HWC) and elsewhere do not often get a chance to collaborate beyond conferences and symposia like this. As a part of an NSF grant, we had an opportunity to address this issue by creating a professional learning community (PLC) for STEM faculty. We built the STEM PLC from the ground up with two of the presenters putting together a small planning group of interested faculty. Spring 2020 marked the inaugural semester of this STEM PLC with 20 HWC STEM faculty participating. Then the pandemic happened. We were forced to pivot, but still managed to make it happen. The participants were, amazingly enough, nearly a perfect mix of science and math faculty, part time and full time faculty. The STEM PLC consists of a variety of activities to engage faculty at every stage of their career, and unlike other professional development opportunities, is designed specifically for STEM faculty. As a result, this session will provide participants a glimpse into what the PLC does and entails, how it came about, and the plans for sustaining it or expanding it.

In this short, interactive presentation and discussion, participants will engage in some of the activities from the STEM PLC workshops. In addition, we will share the logistics of putting the STEM PLC together, facilitating the workshops and semester-long activities, and building as we go for future semesters... and the quick pivot from in person to remote. Time permitting, we will discuss the efficacy of creating similar PLCs elsewhere and the logistics around the grant/the sustainability of the STEM PLC during the grant and beyond.

Many educators have experienced the excitement of trying something new, just to find out that it does not work out as a sustainable practice in their classrooms. We also commonly experience pushes for new changes that everyone expects to be a passing fad that is replaced by the next thing. The success of classroom reforms depends on where we focus efforts to support changes in practice. Change is a messy process that weaves together supports across levels of educational spaces. Eleanor Anderson (2017) developed a framework that focuses on how routines, student identities, policies, and professional roles support both new and old patterns of practice in schools. In my current research work, I am applying the framework to look at an undergraduate physics and earth science course for pre-service elementary education majors that I co-taught this past fall. I believe that it can also be beneficial for educators to use this lens to think about how to approach implementing reforms.

In this breakout session, I will be leading an activity where we work together to apply this framing to the classroom to look more deeply at what is supporting stubborn, antiquated practices and what supports we could leverage more powerfully to sustain change in our classrooms. Together, we will discuss practices that we are trying to integrate into classrooms as well as those that we cannot seem to get rid of and how these practices are being supported by various modes of reproduction. We will use shared Google Docs to document our thinking and discussions. My hope is that all participants will leave the session having thought deeply about the web of supports that sustain classroom practices, both helping and hindering reform efforts.

Anderson,E.R. (2017). Cultivating safe and supportive schools: The implementation and institutionalization of restorative justice practices (Doctoral Dissertation). Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.

College lectures are often long and monotonous. They quickly cover detailed material, making it difficult for even the best note-taker to stay focused. They also leave no time for questions, further reducing student confidence and increasing frustration.

In an effort to make lectures more interactive, I developed a system of class participation points for my intro organismal biology course at Harold Washington College, a 2-year college. I typically use participation points during natural breaks in the content material and ask students to summarize a key idea or to interpret the results of a case study. I give students two to five points for each question they answer correctly, depending on the question’s difficulty level. The total number of class participation points is 40 out of 1000 total points.

In my presentation I first discuss the elements of my class participation system. Second, I discuss the statistical test I would like to use to evaluate the impact of participation points on student learning. Third, I invite my audience to propose an alternative statistical test that could effectively measure the efficacy of participation points. My hope is to encourage resource sharing and the exchange of ideas in the science teaching community.

Student self-efficacy directly impacts their engagement and achievement in mathematical educational settings. Active learning, in terms of pedagogical theory, design and implementation has been shown to correlate with students’ deeper learning of material. Such a desired shift from rote learning is one of the goals of modern learning environments. To measure our success in attaining this modern learning goal, this project examines the correlation between student confidence and performance in different classroom environments through the administration and analysis of student surveys.

Universities, colleges, and schools have responded to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with distance learning. The new virtual learning environment which UIC implemented during the Spring 2020 semester was developed in haste—and learners may have faced challenges as a result. In the Fall of 2020, faculty followed a more structured approach by developing student-friendly online instructional practices aimed at improving student experiences in the virtual classroom. For example, Calculus classes at UIC are now all being taught in virtual learning environments, and we are investigating the impact of this on mathematical learning. Thus, we expanded our pre-pandemic interests into the exploration of student self-efficacy in the online learning environment. We are investigating the effects of this new learning platform on student confidence in calculus classes.

The analysis presented in this project compares survey results obtained by our research team in the Fall of 2019, when students took classes in person, and the Fall of 2020, when classes were online.Overall, we found that from Fall 2019 to Fall 2020, there was a difference in students’ self-reported confidence that varied by class, ethnicity, gender and other demographics. Here, we compare the results that arose in student self-efficacy by class level, student demographics, and professor demographics to highlight any striking differences in student self-efficacy.

The COVID pandemic has created a strong demand for innovate ways to teach science, in particular the laboratory aspects. My college has revised the labs for General Biology into shorter activities that can be accomplished in the home, as part of the synchronous course in Biology 1. The kit contains measuring equipment, disposable plastics, and small bottles of reagents for 12 experiments that include hypothesis testing, at a cost of less than $100. The student provides common ingredients such as salt, sugar, acids (vinegar, coffee), bases (bleach), and test samples (carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, vegetables). This presentation will describe the contents of the lab kit, the experiments, and the challenges and benefits of remote labs, including several surprising successes. These lab kits have been successful for three semesters since the pandemic began.

Months of teaching online during the pandemic have made the promise and peril of online courses clear. Outmoded online teaching tools need to be updated to take advantage of more effective methods and technologies to enhance the teaching and learning experience for synchronous and asynchronous courses. In 2015, the presidents of 14 professional mathematical societies, including all significant organizations such as AMS, MAA, and AMATIC, released a joint statement promoting the integration of active learning methods in schools and colleges.

In this session, we will be presenting an example of how the freeform problem-solving capabilities of our Gradarius platform can be an essential part of a student's active learning experience outside the classroom. Following this demonstration, we would like to host a discussion wherein our participants can share some challenges they have faced and new methods they have developed to meet those challenges.

Active learning is a term first defined by Bonwell and Eison (1991) as "anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing." Finding ways for our students to "do things" is a requirement that can be easily satisfied by asking them to complete an activity such as watching a video, reading a pdf, or solving a problem. The real challenge is getting students to think while working through these activities and connecting with them to build engagement and confidence outside the classroom.Many instructors rely on their online teaching platforms for these tasks. However, roadblocks caused by technical inadequacies in these platforms can be a severe impediment, stopping many from implementing active learning principles across the board. In this session, we will discuss some of those obstacles and introduce a holistic view of active learning centered around fully interactive study and problem-solving activities. We will also touch on other complementary activities that provide a complete learning experience to our students.

Articles mentioned

https://www.cbmsweb.org/2016/07/active-learning-in-post-secondary-mathematics-education/

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/

Labs in a hybrid or remote learning environment are challenging in part because of lack of access to standard lab equipment. However, smartphone-based data acquisition offers opportunities for many worthwhile experiments, particularly in mechanics. This presentation will try to draw attention to some smartphone-based experiments that have worked well for the presenter over the last year and introduce the audience to an app called Phyphox https://phyphox.org/. For some experiments, this approach might be superior to traditional labs in that it inherently requires more student-directed experimental design. Students must improvise and use objects and tools they have on hand to perform their experiments, as compared to the often narrow and prescribed equipment and methods used when performing experiments "in the lab." Can we reintroduce students to their phones as a sophisticated data acquisition tool that they can use to explore the physics of their everyday experiences?