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Connecting your Students to Tutors and Writing Assistance

With Governor Kate Brown’s order that Oregonians all stay at home, we are all now navigating working from off campus as we prepare to enter week three of this unprecedented change due to the Coronavirus. Many of our students are adapting, but others are struggling with living spaces, internet access, multiple online teaching platforms, and financial resources. Increasingly, students are requesting online tutoring from the Learning Commons, but many more could likely use the social peer support that our tutors can provide. Here’s how you can help your students access peer tutoring in our virtual Learning Commons.

Inform your students that requesting appointments with tutors in the virtual Learning Commons hasn’t changed from earlier in the semester.

To access the Writing Center and Math Resource Center, students can make appointments on WCONLINE at https://up.mywconline.net.

All other appointments can be made via the usual email request lines:

Nursing Tutoring: For individual and group peer tutoring in any of the 100–400 level nursing classes, BIO 205, and anatomy and physiology courses students should send an email to nrstutor@up.edu.  For biology and A&P tutoring, they can also contact biotutor@up.edu to make an appointment.

The Language Studio: Students can access language tutor hotlines at chinesetutor@up.edu, frenchtutor@up.edu, germantutor@up.edu, or spanishtutor@up.edu.

Natural Sciences Center: Students can request biology, chemistry, and physics tutoring appointments at biotutor@up.edu, chemtutor@up.edu, or physicstutor@up.edu.

Business Tutoring: Students can request for tutoring in economics (econtutor@up.edu), accounting (accountingtutor@up.edu), finance (financetutor@up.edu), OTM (otmtutor@up.edu), business law (bizlaw@up.edu), and MTH 141/Finite Math (math141@up.edu).

Speech & Presentation Lab: Students can improve your presentation skills online by requesting an appointment at speech@up.edu.

Group Work Lab: Students can meet as a group to develop their project with a Group Work Lab consultant at groupwork@up.edu.

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering: Students can access the computer science tutors at StepUP@up.edu.

All peer tutoring is taking place in a Learning Commons Virtual Tutoring Team in Microsoft Teams. We’ve trained most all the tutors on how to use this platform, and they are finding new ways to turn Teams into an excellent tutoring platform.

What happened to drop-in math tutoring?

On March 22, we held our first drop-in math support online for Sunday Afternoon Math (SAM), and then we started offering regular “drop-in” math tutoring on March 29; we will offer this Sundays through Thursdays from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM for at least the next couple weeks. Sunday Afternoon Math runs each Sunday from 3:00 PM until 5:00 PM. Students can access our drop-in math tutoring Teams page by clicking this link.

During this time of online learning during a pandemic, the Learning Commons offers your students the opportunity to connect, learn, and succeed in reaching their goals. Please encourage them to access our peer tutors by sharing the above information in synchronous meetings and on your Moodle page.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in BC 163 and is an instructor in International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association. He can be reached at white@up.edu or through MS Teams via chat.

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Teaching and learning resources for these trying times

We’ve all been in a crunch over the past week and a half as the spread and unknown reach of the Coronavirus sent us all on many directions. During this time, our colleagues have been learning new systems like Microsoft Teams and TechSmith Relay, and our students have been trying to adjust to our online teaching and content delivery in environments so different than UP. In the Learning Commons, we been training tutors to do their work online in MS Teams, hosting trainings for faculty, and developing content for students. As I write this first Coronavirus era TLC blog entry, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s comment: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” But Twain didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t compress is writing by using hyperlinks like I’ve done below.

So, to be brief, here are some basic ideas that I’ve been gathering in these initial days of COVID-19:

Communicate: Be clear with your students about how you will communicate (i.e., which platforms (Moodle, Teams, Zoom, etc.) you will use. Try to use what we have available here at UP for the sake of consistency and keeping FERPA in mind. Communicate goals of task such as listening and watching lectures and doing readings and include formative assessments that help students know they are reaching those goals.

Chunk: Provide your content in chunks (by day, week, topic, goal); break things down. If you are recording lecture videos. Several 10 minute videos will be better than an hour long recording. You can provide assessment opportunities between videos. If you have students spread out in multiple time zones and want to do some synchronous meeting, hold two or three shorter meetings at different times, so that all can participate at a reasonable time.

Community: Keep a narrative of support going. We’ve all be drinking from a fire hose this last week or so. Encourage your students to be kind to themselves, to build community with each other, and to use some of the strategies for adjusting to online learning that the Learning Commons published last week.

Connect: Provide opportunities for your students to connect with each other and you. This can be done through Teams, but also through other means, like social media, chat, texting, etc. Connect your students to the Learning Commons tutoring which is now all online. Connect yourself to opportunities for learning how to use Teams, TechSmith Relay, and other UP platforms by joining the Faculty Training Sandbox in Teams where training is ongoing or checking out the excellent support documentation that our colleagues in Academic Technology Services and Innovations have developed. You can also link to this from the top of your Moodle page under “Moodle Support.” Also, you may want to turn on your notifications in Moodle, Outlook, and Teams during these days of transition and an increased need for connection.

Kindness: Take care of yourself and be a comfort to your students. These days of COVID-19 are trying times. Our students report feeling overwhelmed and stressed. Remind yourself and your students that we are all growing in the face of difficulties. Things may take longer to accomplish in the coming days and weeks, but we are all learning to create meaningful learning that is central to the UP experience.

I invite you to explore the links above as we re-imagine this semester and our roles as faculty and innovate for the future of our students and our great institution.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163 (and now everywhere online). He is a faculty member in International Languages and Cultures. Jeffrey welcomes the opportunity to help faculty practice and become comfortable with UP’s tools for online teaching and learning. He can be reached at white@up.edu or via Teams in the Faculty Training Sandbox.

 

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Welcome to The Study

Students often need modeling of effective study strategies

When students come to the Learning Commons for content tutoring, they often could use more work on how to study in general and in the content area. How one approaches studying in one discipline variesLogo for The Study: Your Peer Connection to Strategic Learning from other disciplines, and how one approaches studying impacts the grade. We see this particularly when comparing studying in the sciences to studying in the humanities. For example, reading a biology text book chapter requires a different approach than reading a qualitative research report or an essay.

To support students in introductory biology and physics courses, the Learning Commons is piloting The Study, a small-scale study strategies tutoring program that will help students better plan for learning in these subjects and support them in reading, note-taking, and test preparation in the sciences.

Our goals are to increase in the use of metacognitive approaches to learning, confidence, and motivations as revealed in survey data and improve student academic performance as shown by mid-term to final grade data, ultimately reducing D and F grades, as well as course withdrawals. Ultimately, we want to support student retention and graduation.

The motivation for our creation of this pilot also stems from our experiences with tutors sharing and modeling study strategies with tutees. For example, one of our biology tutors Caitlyn worked with a nursing student in a biology course who came in this past semester after receiving a D on a test and was concerned about not making at least a B for the semester. Caitlyn is one of our best tutors for supporting study strategies and will always ask students how they are studying. It became clear to her that the nursing student was not distributing her biology learning over time, not using the textbook as a support, taking far too many notes verbatim (in invariably falling behind while not really taking in the lecture), not transforming notes into new formats (both visual and verbal) and study guides, and not doing self-testing. Over the second half of the semester, the student’s test grades climbed, and she received an A on the final.

The Study is based on findings in the neuroscience of learning and sound learning strategies that have been researched in educational psychology. The pilot program will launch during the second and third weeks of the semester. We will start with a tutor in biology (Caitlyn) to support nursing students in biology courses and another tutor in physics to support engineering students in PHYS 204 and PHYS 205. Students will be able to make appointments with tutors in The Study by emailing requests to TheStudy@up.edu. Tutoring sessions will focus on the following study strategies topics:

  1. Planning time for durable learning and the Study Cycle
  2. Goal setting
  3. Notetaking and organizing concepts
  4. Transforming and synthesizing notes into new formats
  5. Active reading strategies
  6. Self-testing
  7. Test preparation
  8. Post-test performance evaluation

Based on our experiences with students in the Learning Commons. “Planning time for durable learning and the Study Cycle” will likely be foundational for most students using The Study. This pilot program differs from content tutoring that we provide in the Learning Commons. While our content tutors are trained in supporting student study strategies, The Study focuses on disciplinary study strategy work in the context of a content area. In the above case of Caitlyn and her student, they did little in terms of pure content tutoring.

What is the Study Cycle?

The Study Cycle was developed several years ago by Dr. Frank Christ who was a pioneer in learning assistance in higher education. The cycle consists of five steps and the integration of intensive study sessions into students’ schedules. In our work in the Learning Commons we refer to the study sessions as “intentional study sessions.” The five steps are:

  1. Preview before attending class to activate your memory and develop questions
  2. Attend class, take notes, and ask your questions.
  3. Review sometime after class to consolidate or annotate notes and develop more questions.
  4. Study during short and interleaved and focused intentional study sessions.
  5. Self-test how well you can explain or apply the material from the day.

Intentional study sessions (ISS) last anywhere from 30 to 70 minutes and involve goals setting for the session, active studying toward the goals, a short break, and a short review to consolidate material and develop questions for the next study session or class. Students then interleave study sessions. For example, a student studies in a period of a few hours biology, then philosophy, followed by a session for another class.

Our objectives for The Study

During our planning process, we developed four program objectives for The Study:

  1. Participants will be able to apply the Study Cycle and principles of distributed learning, varied practice, and interleaving to their weekly study plans.
  2. Participants will be able to apply effective study strategies in one or more of the following areas: notetaking and processing notes, reading strategies, preparing for tests and test-taking, evaluating test performance.
  3. Affectively, participants report feeling more confidence and motivation when engaging in course work and, cognitively, they report increased use metacognitive approaches in terms of planning and strategy selection and application.
  4. Participation in The Study leads to improvements in the participants’ academic performance.

These will be measured and documented through tutor reports, participant surveys, and grade data. Depending on the results of the pilot, we will either expand in the fall or continue refining the program on a small scale.

For more information on The Study or to discuss ways of incorporating study strategies into your courses and office hours, contact Jeffrey White, Learning Commons administrator at white@up.edu.

For further reading

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A., (2014). Make it stick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E. J., Mitchell, N.J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58, doi:10.1177/1529100612453266.

Hattie, J. A. & Donoghue, G. M. (2016). Learning strategies: a synthesis and conceptual model. npj Science of Learning (1), 1-13. doi:10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.13.

LSU Center for Academic Success (n.d.). How to Study for Note-Based Courses. Retrieved from https://www.lsu.edu/cas/earnbettergrades/note-based.php.

McGuire, S. Y. & McGuire, S. (2015). Teach students how to learn. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

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Mentally Healthy: The most common trauma experiences

plant seedling in a handThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

While no one would ever wish a trauma experience on a student, the reality is that trauma experiences are common and often unavoidable. The question becomes how we respond. While ‘post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’ has come into common parlance and helped people better recognize the possible long-term effects of trauma, psychologists are also very interested in ‘post-traumatic growth’ and encourage a recognition that with the right support trauma is not always debilitating.

The Portland-based Education Northwest organization makes available a broad guide on Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education that covers a wide range of trauma experiences. The American Counseling Association also has information available about what to expect from “Distressed College Students Following Traumatic Events” including examples of effects that might include suicide threat, memory loss, comments trigger flashbacks, and survivor’s guilt.

Here I’ll also just briefly discuss two types of trauma experiences seem particularly common among college students: the death of a loved one, and experiences of sexual assault.

According to the University of California guide for Promoting Student Mental Health “Between 35 and 48 percent of college students have lost a family member or close friend within the last two years (Balk, 1997; Wrenn, 1999; Balk, Walker & Baker, 2010). Furthermore, 8.6 percent of college students’ academic performances have been affected by the death of a family member or close friend within the last year (Servaty-Seib & Hamilton, 2006). Research shows that a student’s GPA significantly decreases during the semester of loss, providing empirical support for the assertion that bereaved students are at risk for declined academic performance (Servaty-Seib, 2006).”

Beyond referring students with significant grief needs to the UP Health and Counseling Center and to the Early Alert / Care Team, there are quite a few resources for educators working with grieving students. While many of these are geared at K-12 educational contexts, an organization called Actively Moving Forward is specifically geared toward “connecting and empowering grieving college students” while also being part of a broader Coalition to Support Grieving Students offering resources such as these suggestions of “what not to say”:

what not to say

The University of California guide for faculty and staff also notes that “The statistics for the sexual assault of college women is staggering: one in four or five college women will be survivors of a sexual assault during their college career. While approximately 90 percent of sexual assault survivors are female, it is estimated that 10 percent of survivors are male. While most sexual assaults are committed by men against women, men are also assaulted by women, and same-sex assaults also occur. The transgender population is also at risk. The majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the survivor (e.g., an acquaintance, date, partner or former partner, or family member) and most of these assaults go unreported.”

When faculty and academic staff are confronted with this type of trauma, the UP Title IX office offers a helpful guide elaborating on a five step model:

Step 1 – Support. Offer support non-judgmentally and with empathy.

Step 2 – Safety. Assess for safety. [contacting Public Safety at 503 943 7161 if necessary]

Step 3 – Confidentiality. Inform about the limits of confidentiality to conversation. [noting that with UP employees it cannot be completely confidential]

Step 4 – Resources. Refer to appropriate resources.

Step 5 – Report. Report to the Title IX Office.

 

Photo by Ravi Roshan on Unsplash