KCC FIG – Undergraduate Research as a High Impact Practice

Minutes of the Meeting of Fri, 3/18/2022, 10:20am via Zoom

Mary Theresa Ortiz – Facilitator

Present:  Grace Axler-DiPerte (KCC BIO Faculty), Christina Colon (KCC BIO Faculty),

Michael Hojnacki (AP Science at NDHS and KCC College Now Science Faculty)

Lilja Nielsen (KCC BIO Faculty), Mary Ortiz (KCC BIO Faculty)

Stephanie Palumbo (NDHS Science Teacher and Science Research Program)

Meeting began at 10:20am.

1. Mary welcomed everyone and thanked them for coming. Everyone introduced themselves.
2. Grace shared that because this is our first semester back from the pandemic, she is putting on hold a more extensive research and interaction with the farm in her BIO5000 (General Microbiology) class with respect to the Winogradsky columns. She will be working, though, with Shannon.
3. Mary discussed the joint linguistics research project between her Biostatistics classes (BIO9100, MAT9100) and Laura Spinu’s Speech 29 (Voice and Articulation) and Speech 40 (Phonetics) classes. Laura’s classes will generate the data.  Mary’s classes will analyze the data.  Mary explained how the logistics of the project have evolved over the last few of months since the modality of Mary’s classes went from in-person to online asynchronous.  Issues (ex. classes not meeting in person together, one-on-one interaction) were shared.
   1. Grace suggested the students could use Flip Grid to record videos to explain their part in the project to be shared via Blackboard for all of the students to have a better understanding of the project. Mary thought perhaps this could be an extra credit assignment for any interested students to do in her classes.  Grace offered to help with this.
   2. Christina shared she has her students narrate their PowerPoint slides to explain concepts. Maybe the students could do this as part of the project to explain different parts.  Christina said that you can re-record narrations for a slide, save and edit them.  She says the students give one-minute narrations and it works well.  Make the PPT first, save it as a PPT, then go in and record a narration on each slide.  Then upload it to Blackboard.  Christina has the students check each other’s work and give feedback to their classmates.
4. Michael asked what we want the high school students to know before leaving high school.
   1. Lilja suggested math skills and the Metric System and measurement.
   2. Christina suggested reading strategically; knowing process and not just repeating what is read.
   3. Grace suggested deep reading; give critical analysis.
   4. Mary suggested graphing and basic statistics (mean, standard deviation) and what it means.
   5. Grace suggested learning something about working with unknowns.
   6. Grace and Lilja both suggested the students be made aware that in real labs there isn’t a right answer; not everything works. In research we deal with what no one has ever seen before.
5. Stephanie shared that in the Fall the science research students at New Dorp High School (NDHS) did a hydroponics project where they grew mustard greens, used a budget; etc. In the Spring they will work on the environment in NYC, recycling, waste, GMO perceptions, and watering projects with plants.
6. Michael explained that the “NYC Science Fair” is now “Regeneron” and judges are needed for the event. The question was posed if college students can judge the science fair.  Michael will find out.
7. Christina shared about her research with students helping to tag horseshoe crabs.
8. Christina discussed her research on coyotes in NYC, and she and Mary discussed possibly teaming up the BIO5300 (Ecology) and BIO/MAT9100 (Biostatistics) classes to do a joint project.
9. Our next meeting will be on Fri April 1, 2022 at 10:20am via Zoom. Mary will send the Zoom info out with the minutes of this meeting.

Meeting adjourned at 11:20pm.

Minutes respectfully submitted by Mary Theresa Ortiz

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