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City Tech Students Reap Benefit of Having Adjunct Professors as Tutors
Adjunct Academy co-directors Yasemin Jones (left) and Elaine Maldonado.
It was clear to Elaine Maldonado, director of the Academic Learning Centers at New York City College of Technology, that the College’s engineering technology students needed more than assistance from peer tutors to be successful in their electrical circuits and circuit analysis courses. These “high-risk” courses had pass rates of 52 percent and 62 percent, respectively, negatively impacting student retention.
Taking a page from the successful pilot program she had run for freshman composition students in the fall of 2003 -- in which part-time English faculty were hired to address student writing and the complexities of language acquisition -- Maldonado applied for, and received a $500,000 U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to expand the initiative to the College’s School of Technology & Design.
In Spring 2005, part-time Technology & Design faculty began offering a range of services to students, from tutoring to exam prep and course technology access. In that first semester of the initiative, 357 students made 754 visits to meet with adjunct faculty in the College’s Tech Learning Center. The six participating part-time faculty members tutored an average of six hours a week for 13 weeks.
Results show both students and faculty benefit from what Maldonado has termed the “Adjunct Academy.” Pass rates in the Electrical Circuits course went from 52 percent in fall 2004 to 82 percent for the students who received faculty tutoring in Fall 2005. In the same period of time, the pass rate for the Circuits Analysis course went from 62 percent to 89 percent.
“Students are benefiting from having a tutor who is not only a professor at the College, but, as a practicing professional in a given field, also serves as a mentor to students interested in high tech careers and an all-around resource for the student,” Maldonado explains. “Besides being role models, the faculty tutors also offer students an appreciation of their respective careers.”
The adjunct faculty, who at most colleges don’t get paid for interacting with students after class, now supplement their teaching salary by tutoring or conducting study groups before or after class. They are also compensated to help students make connections to the workplace by sponsoring students in design and exhibition competitions, including students in work projects off campus and providing students with opportunities in the professional associations with which they are associated. All of this serves to strengthen adjuncts’ connection with the College, according to Maldonado.
“The FIPSE grant has enabled us to put together the best Adjunct Academy prototype that we can and to restructure how the College’s regular tutoring budget is spent,” Maldonado says. “The beauty of the program is that we are able to work within our existing tutoring budget to provide a higher quality product. Since the teacher-tutor is foremost an experienced instructor, the level of expertise he or she brings to the College’s learning centers, as a tutor, is of a different caliber than that of a student tutor.”
For example, instead of hiring three peer writing tutors, Maldonado now hires one teacher-tutor. Since the teacher-tutor is teaching the writing course, the level of expertise he or she brings to the College’s learning centers is of a much higher caliber than that of the peer tutor. Maldonado is quick to explain, however, that she plans to keep peer tutors because “they play an important role, too.”
In Spring 2006, ten City Tech faculty members from the School of Technology & Design are participating and the expected number of students served will increase to over 500.
Employing the services of an additional 20 part-time English and math faculty, the Adjunct Academy program also serves students taking credit-bearing math and physics courses and the first two levels of English, as well as courses offered by eight of the 10 departments in the School of Technology & Design. For core math courses, 995 students made more than 3,015 visits and for the English courses, 692 students made 2,199 visits to these 20 adjuncts in Spring 2005. At least as many students are anticipated for the Spring 2006 semester.
The success of this initiative and its ease of implementation have not been lost on other units of The City University of New York. The acting assistant provost at Queens College, Dr. June Bobb, met with City Tech Provost Bonne August, Maldonado and her co-director, Dr. Yasemin Jones, to discuss the project. Maldonado and Jones will present their findings at the College of Staten Island on March 14th. Baruch Assistant Provost Dennis Slavin has also voiced interest in a presentation on his campus in the near future.
The City Tech adjunct academy model is also becoming known in other education circles. Dr. Jones made a presentation on the Adjunct Academy at the American Society for Engineering Education’s Annual Conference in June 2005, which also resulted in the co-authored, published paper: “The Adjunct Academy at City Tech: Academic Support for First-Year Engineering Students at an Urban College.” Findings were recently presented at the FIPSE Directors’ Conference at the Department of Education in Washington D.C. in January, 2006, and the Adjunct Academy will act as sponsor for the ASEE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in April 2006.
Finally, at the request of City Tech’s faculty union chapter representative Bob Cermele, the project was highlighted at a Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) meeting, underscoring the important strides the project has made in helping to better integrate part-time faculty into campus life.
Maldonado looks forward to expanding the institutionalization of the program into City Tech’s School of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the School of Professional Studies, and efforts are already underway with regard to new dissemination and publishing opportunities.
3/8/06
