91ÖÆƬ³§

Faculty noticed that students in 91ÖÆƬ³§U 351 were not meeting the target set by the program. This was then causing issues in a 400 level course. As a result, the program and its instructors decided to implement additional online resources to supplement class lectures.

In the following year, students improved their project scores by 13% and their ability to integrate knowledge of scientific foundations was meeting the target set by the program.

Through the collection and analysis of the final lab report in the capstone course, faculty found that students were not meeting their expectations for demonstrating quantitative analysis skills. The undergraduate education committee investigated this issue further and devised a plan of action.

The faculty implemented two changes to the undergraduate curriculum: (1) the creation of a 1 credit laboratory class to be taken in conjunction with an existing 300 level course; (2) increasing the number of credits for 91ÖÆƬ³§U 310 from 3 to 4 credits. The latter change will allow us to include a recitation section to the course in which students will be given greater opportunities to work on quantitative problems relevant to the topic of the class.

Our hope is that these two changes will better prepare and train our students in the quantitative and logic skills needed to analyze the data sets generated in the field studies class.

Over the past several years the undergraduate program has seen a trend in students receiving low pass rates on the Praxis I.

After some analysis and review by the program, the decision was made to purchase the NorthStar PRAXIS Core Prep package that is accessible on-line for free by all students. All teacher candidates are advised to use this resource. Advisors were instructed to share and show this resource to students during the spring advising meeting.

Since the addition of this resource and targeted advising, students' Reading scores on PRAXIS Core continue to be stronger than their scores on the Writing subtest.