GC Journeys Newsletter

Six Georgia College Students Have Been Accepted to Share Their Research With State Law Makers.

The "Posters at the Georgia State Capitol" event will take place on February 28th, 2020 and six Georgia College undergraduate students will be presenting their research in front of state legislators. Posters at the Capitol is an extremely competitive and prestigious opportunity for undergraduates to demonstrate their hard work and research accomplishments. This year's event had over 80 submissions with only 40 students are accepted. Out of the sixteen institutions represented, only Kennesaw State and Mercer had more students accepted than Georgia College.

GC Students Participating Include:

Megan Andrews (Chemistry) will present "A salivary hormonal study on individuals of African ancestry living in different socio-economic environments, in order to understand etiology of prostate cancer," she is mentored by Dr. Wathsala Medalwa.

Catherine Boyd (Physics) will present "The Effect of Solar Power on Golf Cart Runtime." and is mentored by Dr. Hasitha Mahabaduge.

Samuel Cavender (Physics) will present "Increasing the Performance of a Solar Charging Station Through Solar Tracking" and is mentored by Dr. Hasitha Mahabaduge.

Amelia Dubose and Maddie Drives (Psychology) will present "Family SES and Parental Perceptions of Children's Aggressive Behaviors" and are mentored by Tsu-Ming Chiang.

Ashley Newkirk (Music Therapy) will present "Music at Midway" and is mentored by Dr. Katie Whipple

The Career Planning Milestones is a four-year career development planning model, and one of the key experiences that make up the GC Journeys Program. Within the model are yearly benchmarks aimed at encouraging students to interact with the Career Center and participate in impactful experiences crafted to assist students in their post-graduation planning whether employment, graduate or pre-professional schooling.

In order to reach students through classroom activities and collaborate with Faculty, we created a Career Planning Milestones Guide for Faculty. The guide discusses how to integrate this high-impact, transformational experience into courses.

Additionally, outside of traditional appointments, the Career Center provides numerous special events and workshops throughout the semester to guide students through the Career Planning Milestones process. Check out our Spring 2020 Calendar for upcoming events the Career Center will facilitate to help students as they navigate to the next phase of their journey.

The new journal, Undergraduate Research, which will publish undergraduate research from students across the nation is seeking a GC faculty member to serve as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief. The call for an editor has been extended and is due February 15th. Email: jordan.cofer@gcsu.edu with questions.

Sign Up Here

• February 13th, 2020 12:30-1:00 (Museum Education Room)
• March 25th, 2020 3:15-3:45 (Museum Education Room)
• April 16th, 2020 3:30-4:00 (Museum Education Room)

VALUE Rubrics are a set of 16 rubrics which were released in 2009. The development of the rubrics was led by The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), and each one was designed by, “Teams of faculty and other educational professionals from institutions across the country—two- and four-year, private and public, research and liberal arts, large and small” (AAC&U). You can access the rubrics at https://www.aacu.org/value-rubrics. You will find rubrics for 13 of the 14 GC Journeys “essential skills,” one of which will be taught in each undergraduate course at Georgia College. (The 14th rubric, “global understanding,” we developed ourselves on site.)

These rubrics are not commonly used for the one thing we usually use rubrics for: assessing student work. Instead, their primary purpose is to lay out the constituent parts of any given skill or competency and also describe what excellence in that competency might look like. Each rubric lays out a definition of the competency on the first page along with definitions of terms used that might be unfamiliar. On the second page, the constituent parts of the competency are in the far-left hand column and then descriptions of various levels of mastery are described, ranging from level 4 (“capstone”) down to level 1. At Georgia College, we will be using these rubrics as a starting point as we consider how to teach and assess essential skills in core and major courses. Ideally, we will be able to use the rubrics “as is” in many cases so that we can compare the work of our students to the work of other students nationwide. But in some cases, the rubrics will need to be modified to better suit the needs of a given course. These rubrics are incredibly useful for sparking discussion with students or faculty, designing learning activities, and assessing random samples of student work to determine where we are succeeding at developing these skills with our students and where we need further tweaking.

A crucial part of the GC Journeys initiative is not just the focus on transformative experiences (high-impact practices), but also the essential skills embedded into the core curriculum.

These skills (see the full list here) are skills that AAC&U have identified, through educational research and studies with employers, as being critical for students. TGC’s first ever assessment of these skills show students progressing, hitting targets, and demonstrating mastery on skills such as Global Learning, Inquiry and Analysis, Quantitative Literacy, and Written Communication.

See the results below. For more information about how these skills are mapped to the Core Curriculum see here. For more info on core assessment, visit here.

Email: journeys@gcsu.edu
Website: https://www.gcsu.edu/gcjourneys
Location: Carl Vinson House