Session IV (11:29–11:59 a.m.)

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Jason Counihan • Green River College

Traditional exams fall short in asynchronous online classes, thanks to the abundance of resources that allow students to avoid learning. In order to make these exams more fair and diversify how I assess students, I have begun including oral components in many of my exams and projects. I’ll show you the variations of this format that I now use after eight quarters developing it, and why I (and many of my students!) think it’s worth the effort.

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Kristen Harvey • Walla Walla Community College

Stories have multiple access points for students, so they are a non-threatening, low-stakes way to introduce math concepts. As they engage the students with laughter or memories of childhood story times, students’ emotional states relax so they are able to absorb new content. Storytelling helps turn math class into something fun and sparks students’ curiosity about how the story relates to the math concept, thus increasing student engagement. Some stories are used for introducing concepts, while others teach, reinforce or even extend mathematical concepts. In this presentation, I will be telling the story of “The Radical Kingdom” by using a Promethean Board and sharing other successful stories (and maybe some songs, too) that I have used in the developmental mathematics classroom.

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Eric Schulz • Walla Walla Community College

Teaching students about the transformations of functions has always been a strange experience. The vertical scales and shifts are straightforward. Explanations of the concepts are straightforward, and a decent amount of practice results in success. Then come the horizontal transformations. We run out of breath explaining why `f(2x+6) ` results in a horizontal compression and left shift of `3 ` units, not a horizontal expansion and a right shift. Even with our best efforts, students can quickly forget and mess up horizontal transformations after they leave our care. There is a better way! Learn a new technique that will transform the way you explain horizontal transformations (pun intended 😊).

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Sherry McLean • Lake Washington Institute of Technology

LWTech recently implemented a graduation requirement for all students to take a Diversity and Social Justice (DSJ designation) course. In this session, the presenter will share how a Math 107 (Math in Society) course was redesigned to meet both the quantitative reasoning and DSJ requirements for students in a single class. Participants will walk away with ideas to integrate DSJ principles into their math classes (or to redesign an entire course around it!).


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