You may complete each end-of-the-week research and reflection journal anytime after Friday’s class and before Monday’s class. I’d like you to spend about an hour on this assignment: To earn full credit, please read the instructions carefully and fulfill all of the expectations. (Make sure to check how long your paragraphs need to be, for example!)  Work that does not fulfill all of the expectations will earn a maximum of half credit. 

The goals of this assignment are:

1) to help you make sense of and remember the important elements of our week’s work so you can build on that knowledge throughout the quarter,

2) to help Mary understand what you understand and what you are confused about,

3) to offer you regular practice in summarizing, analyzing and responding to sources.

There are two parts to this assignment each week:

A. First you will spend about 20 minutes reflecting on the work we did, in and outside of the classroom. This week, you continued to work on your annotated bibliography assignment, and you posted rough drafts of APA citations, summary paragraphs and evaluation paragraphs through Canvas discussion posts. Many students had questions about how to evaluate sources, so we reviewed the evaluation guidelines from the TCC library. Those are the guidelines you will use when you write your evaluation paragraphs. You’ll select 2-4 questions to answer and explain carefully. (You don’t need to answer all of the questions.) We also clarified that your evaluations will likely discuss strengths and weaknesses of the sources. That’s normal: sources are hardly ever all good or all bad. It is important to examine both so you understand the assignment expectations and are able to do your best work.

1. What did you find most useful and interesting about class this week? What progress did you make?

2. What did you find most confusing? What challenges/barriers are you facing?

To earn full credit, you need to explain yourself carefully — what you found useful and confusing —  in one full well-explained paragraph of at least 250 words.

B. Second, you will continue to learn more about barriers to community college student success and how colleges have made changes to ensure that more students graduate and succeed after graduation.

You’ll spend 30 minutes or so reading through information about the 2017 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence and answer the following questions:

1. What does the Aspen Prize information say are the four elements that determine community college excellence?

2. Scroll down and select one of the top five community colleges to learn more about (San Jacinto College, Odessa College, Indian River State College, Broward College, or Lake Area Technical Institute.) Read through the report on that college and, in a paragraph of at least 250 words, discuss what you found most interesting/powerful about the specific steps that college took to improve student success and completion rates. Why did you find it interesting? What do you notice that is relevant to your own experience as a student? From your own experience at TCC, could we take similar steps to improve student success and completion?

Please remember that to earn full credit, your work needs to meet the expectations of this assignment and your paragraph must be at least 250 words. You may write conversationally — this doesn’t need to be super formal — but your writing should demonstrate intelligent and serious work. You will receive at most half credit if your work doesn’t meet those expectations.