PP 315 Semester Project
The semester project has traditionally been a 10-page paper on a concept of plant pathology, a disease, or a description of a plant-microbe interaction. Results were poor with students waiting until the last minute to put their ideas on paper and most didn’t fully understand what they researched. To combat these issues, Dr. Shew and I developed a semester project to encourage creativity and combine arts and science. Students enjoyed the group project more and presented information, which increased understanding and retention of the material. Below are the project guidelines I prepared for fall 2011 and the revisions for the fall 2012 and 2013 semesters. Revisions were based on how students performed the first year the project was implemented. Changes include include a max of two students per group, deadlines for abstracts so projects would be started earlier in the semester, and more detailed descriptions of requirements. I also made a grading rubric to help students revise their projects and make them better. The link to completed projects show pictures of actual submissions from past years.
CoAT: Project Guidelines
PP 315 Lab Quizzes
I created the following quizzes for the fall 2011 semester and one quiz was given at the start of each lab period. Quizzes were designed to encourage students to review the previous lab material and read the experiments to be conducted in lab that same day. My comments are circled in blue ink. The weekly quiz encouraged students to review the lab material before they came to class, but it also created a lot of grading for me and it was not a popular weekly assignment.
Teaching Portfolio of Kestrel McCorkle 