Kirkwood & Totten Pairing Courses to Support Underprepared Students

24/F 11:00 AM White

Type_Presentation: 60-minute Concurrent Session

PresentationTitle: Pairing courses to support underprepared students

ProgramStrand_Primary: College Reading

ProgramStrand_Secondary: Paired Courses

Presentation_description:

Underprepared students lacking critically reading skills often take a study skills course prior to enrolling in discipline courses. Pairing courses focused on collegiate-level reading with discipline courses allows students to immediately apply skills. Participants will learn the Critical Inquiry process, annotation and higher-order cognitive skills transferable to other courses.

Session_summary:

Pairing courses to support underprepared students

More students are entering college without the ability to critically read and master information from collegiate texts. Many first-time college students with weak to marginal academic records are asked to take a study skills course before advancing to collegiate-level courses.

To avoid the “fix before taking academic courses” approach, two Indiana universities are offering a paired course approach with Critical Inquiry (CI) and a variety of introductory discipline-based courses often taken by first year students. These pairings are designed to help students to develop collegiate-level critical reading abilities and vocabulary, understand the components and strategies for critical thinking, develop appropriate written and oral communication and annotation skills, and engage in active learning in the discipline course to which CI is linked. Thus, CI courses are designed for students to learn how-to-learn so they can transfer learning strategies to other courses Rather than teach low level skill building, this approach focuses on a step-by-step process to develop higher-order cognitive skills that facilitate the transitioning from high school to college. This also provides the students with the opportunity to evaluate and celebrate their progress and the success of the strategies on a day-to-day basis.

CI is commonly linked with social science, science, and math courses. Content for each CI course varies depending on the subject link, but all CI courses have common learning outcomes consisting of skills that are transferable to all college courses. Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis designed the CI program after a year-long examination of national best practices for building skills of developmental learners. Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne has adopted and adapted the program for its campus including a focus on success in traditionally difficult science and math courses. This presentation will focus on the course design including the Critical Inquiry process, adjustments for different subjects, assessment of student satisfaction, and the effectiveness of the approach.

Handouts will include a definition of the Critical Inquiry process, annotation material, a Bloom’s Taxonomy chart, and a sample syllabus.

Participants will take part in a mini lesson on the CI process including annotation and question analysis using Bloom’s Taxonomy. There will also be discussion on assessment of the effectiveness and satisfaction of the course. This presentation is appropriate for instructors or tutors working with underprepared students, but is also valuable to improve the skills of any student.

PresenterBio:

Barbara Kirkwood is currently the Associate Director for Group Support Services at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne. She has been working on student success for over 30 years including designing a freshman course that focuses on EI. She is working with a team on a study of students taking remediation courses or the course focusing on EI. She is a member of the Midwest Think Tank on Emotional Intelligence and was a planner for the Midwest EI conference in 2008.

Presenter2_Bio:

Charles Totten is the academic skills coordinator at IPFW and has been teaching courses based on emotional intelligence for several years. He was educated in Europe, spent time as a priest in the Vatican, experienced in business, and is now dedicated to education.