438 ACTIVITY 1B: Clarifying the Course Syllabus

WHY:

A course syllabus is a gold mine of information to help you learn what the course is about and what is required of each student. You will be working in teams much of the time and we will be rotating roles every week all semester, so you need to know what is expected of each team member and of the team as a whole. Taking control of your own learning and learning in teams is important in other courses here at Saint Mary's and also on the job.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Discover what is expected of you during the semester.
2. Gain an overview of Math Programming
3. Learn how to be an effective team member.

CRITERIA:

1. Quality of the answers to the Critical Thinking Questions.
   • Completeness
   • Clarity
   • Depth
2. How effectively each team member performed her role.
   • Produced quality oral or written report
   • Helped team perform at high level

INFORMATION:

The syllabus is organized in several sections:

1. Overview of the course objectives, theme, and policies;
2. Course grading and topics;
3. Knowledge Map (see below);
4. Team roles and their criteria;
5. Classification of Learning Skills (see below);
6. Mathematics department honesty policy;

The Classification of Learning Skills lists the skills you will need to become a better learner. You should reflect on your abilities in the four domains: cognitive, affective, social, and psychomotor when you write in your journal each week.

The Knowledge Map outlines the concepts, processes, tools, contexts and Ways of Being which we will work on in this course. It shows how the concepts relate to one another. The Base Concepts are those which you should already know. I will give you a quiz next Tuesday on these concepts. You must get 90% correct or you will have to retake the quiz. This quiz grade counts 10% of your overall grade and the more you have to retake it, the lower the grade will be. I will schedule frequent review sessions to help you relearn the base concepts if needed.

You will notice in the grading section that there are * in front of many of the point totals. You will decide how much of the other 90% of the total points to allocate to each part of the course (e.g. tests, homework, projects, daily work, journal, etc.).

RESOURCES:

1. Chapter 1, Strategic Mathematics
2. Class Syllabus
3. 30 minutes

PLAN:

1. Choose roles if you have not already done so.
2. Divide up the syllabus in four parts, with the captain assigning each team member a part:
   1. Course Objectives, Theme, and Policies;
   2. Grading, Syllabus, Learning Journal and Knowledge Map;
   3. Group roles and Criteria;
   4. Classification of Learning Skills;
3. Review your section quickly.
4. As a team, answer the critical thinking questions by pooling the information read by the team members.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS:

These will be provided in class.

SKILL EXERCISES:

1. Choose a syllabus from one of your other courses and develop a set of critical thinking questions which will help you analyze it. Make a list of the skills you will need to succeed in the course you choose.
   
   
2. Go through the base concepts and mark the ones you know that you know. Develop a plan to learn the others. What resources do you have?
   
   
3. Using your textbook, write next to each item in the Knowledge Map the page number(s) where it is treated. Why is this a helpful exercise?

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   Math 338 Activity 1B -- Revised 8/13/98