danaleeling

SC 130 Physical Science is centered on four course level learning outcomes: Explore physical science systems through experimentally based laboratories using scientific methodologies Define and explain concepts, theories, and laws in physical science. Generate mathematical models for physical science systems and use appropriate mathematical techniques and concepts to obtain quantitative solutions to problems in physical science. Demonstrate basic communication skills by working in groups on laboratory experiments and by writing up the result of experiments, including thoughtful discussion and interpretation of data, in a formal format using spreadsheet and word processing software. The course is philosophically centered on science as an emergent truth that arises from experimentally observed data. Hence course learning outcome number three refers to generating mathematical models, not to being given mathematical models.  In this respect the course is guided by Galileo's observation...

As with all of my blogs, the audience for this post is a single person, me. I use blogs as notes I can consult in the future to determine how I accomplished something, and provide a place to record formulas I used to solve particular problems. In this case I needed to connect grade exports from Moodle to class exports from MyShark to produce a list of students on early warning. As the target audience is my future self, these notes are necessarily abbreviated and may be missing steps that I know intuitively. That said, this might benefit someone somewhere when dealing with related complications. I needed advisor information for each student which is only available from an extended student data export in MyShark. I also needed grades from the Grades: Export menu in each course. Note that the export menu link is the same except for the course ID, so link editing can jump one from one export screen to another directly. If a course has multiple sections, then Groups have to be previously se...

An anonymous preassessment briefly looked at some of the graphical mathematical skills the students have in my fall 2025 courses. The preassessment also asked a few basic linear calculations. The preassessment was sent via a link in an email to the 137 students in my courses for fall 2025. The survey was completed anonymously, remotely, and unsupervised. 36 students responded to the preassessment.  The students were in both mathematical and non-mathematical courses. The survey asked some math course background questions, and then presented the following questions. The survey included images for graphical questions.  Which of the points is at the coordinate (3,1)? What is the slope of the line on the graph? Enter the slope as a decimal value. What is the y-intercept of the line on the graph? Which line on the graph matches the data in the time versus distance table? If a person is running at 2.58 meters per second, how far will they go in 3600 seconds? Do not include the unit...

Student evaluations of instructor, course, and course materials provide guidance for the institutions on areas of relative strengths and areas where there may be room for improvement. Term-on-term comparisons between summer 2025 and spring 2025 are confounded by the spring student evaluations only being distributed in online courses. The spring data does not include residential courses, with a few exceptions where a student chose to evaluate a residential course using the online evaluation form.  This report presumes familiarity with the student evaluations form in use at the institution and the results typically seen. The responses were converted to numeric values: Strongly disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree Number of student responses by term Means by evaluation section and term Instructor evaluations Click to enlarge The overall average for the prompts in the instructor evaluation section was 4.618. While this was an improvement from the 4.502 mean spring 2025, the s...