This assignment is designed for students in First Year Seminar for Engineering and Computer Science. The main goal of the assignment is to introduce students to their major and stimulating their interests related to career choices and academics. This will give students a chance to develop integrative learning skills by making connections between their major and respective career opportunities. This assignment will use new features of ePortfolio to enhance student‰Ûªs creativity by customizing everything from background, photos, fonts, text, portfolio content etc. Instead of a uniform profile, each students‰Ûª page will reflect the distinct visual representation of their personality, brand, major, and career. Students will review their peers‰Ûª ePortfolios to provide constructive feedback. The ePortfolio page will later be deposited once approved by the faculty.

This is a youth to youth guide to the GED. Written for and by youth it is a learner-centered tool for understand choices and options around the GED.

This assignment was designed for students in the pathways introductory chemistry class and the first year seminar and aligns with the Inquiry and Problem Solving core competency. In this context, there is a focus on framing the issues (identifies and/or addresses questions and problems), evidence gathering (assembles, reviews and synthesizes evidence from several diverse sources), evidence (analyze the data to address the questions posed) and conclusions (critical thinking, reflect on the outcomes, draw conclusions and generate new knowledge). There is also a Global Learning component based on comparing data collected locally with corresponding data from other locations or countries. The assignment includes the written communication ability with a focus on "Content Development and Organization," as well as the clarity of the communication and its purpose. The overall aim of this assignment is to enhance students' conceptual learning and understanding of key issues related to society as well as their course. This assignment was developed as part of a LaGuardia Global Learning mini-grant and CUNY Experiential Learning and Research in the Classroom mini-grants.
The assignment will be scaffolded over about 3 weeks and is worth about 10% of the final grade.
To further increase the success of this assignment, instructors might want to consider the following: Use class discussions to focus on the relevance and importance of conceptual learning. In order to improve the data analysis aspect, incorporating class demonstrations of how to conduct the analysis and guide discussions about what the data means. Giving students more detailed rubrics with formal expectations of the requirements of the assignments, particularly in the written format Find ways to increase student participation in class discussions.
When this assignment has been utilized in previous semesters, students clearly displayed the capability to relate the co-curricular experiences in the data collection and its analysis to concepts and ideas covered during class. Evidence for this came from very dynamic and interactive class discussions based on air pollution as well as from the output of the written assignment, in which students were able to relate the nature, sources and chemical properties of the pollutants to their impact on the environment, health and society in general.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
List the Program Goal(s) that this assignment targets
Global Learning based on comparing pollutant levels around the LaGuardia campus with those in other locations or countries. It is also an IPS assignment, incorporating scientific literacy and thinking, as students need to analyze the data, interpret it and reflect on the outcomes.
List the Student Learning Objective(s) that this assignment targets
Identify and apply fundamental chemical concepts and methods. Gather, analyze, and interpret data.
List the Course Objectives(s) that this assignment targets
Explore the complex connections between chemistry and society. Apply chemical principles to real world issues, including ethical aspects. Gather, analyze, and interpret data.
Write a short description of the pedagogy involved in executing this assignment
Students collect and analyze the data, interpret the results in terms of pollution levels, safety and ethics and compare with EPA standard levels and with levels in other countries.
Outside the classroom events will be organized for data collection. There will be class and group-based discussions focused on the data, its analysis and the connections to society.

This assignment works toward developing students' competency in Inquiry and Problem Solving. The problem solving arises as they negotiate contradictory viewpoints about genres of American music, specifically related to topic areas covered in class (such as class, gender, identity, race, authenticity, and place).

This two week assignment asks students to interpret and analyze the 1974 Arecibo Message sent by Drake and Sagan. Week 1 introduces the concepts behind the construction of the message and engages with a critical analysis of the architecture and the contents of the message. Week 2 asks students to develop software in a Jupyter Notebook (available for free from the Anaconda Python Distribution) to interpret messages that were similar to those produced by Drake and Sagan.

Students perform a literature review on a biology topic, choose 2-3 papers published in scientific journals to discuss in their assignment, provide a final opinion on the topic, and some voluntarily present on their selected topic.

This assignment was inspired by a group discussion by faculty who teach the First Year Seminar in Business (BTF101) during the 2018-19 Rebooting the FYS Seminar. BTF101 is a two-credit course that meets for a total of 3 hours. We were tasked with ways to improve course assignments aimed at strengthening students‰Ûª Global Learning Competency and Digital Communication Ability. The topic of sweatshops abroad is a proven way to introduce a Global Learning assignment with a business related topic. In order to deepen the students‰Ûª learning on the subject, the assignment tasks students with taking on the role of a Corporate Responsibility Officer (CRO) for Nike. In choosing to put students in this role, they are required to think of multiple perspectives as required by the Global Learning rubric.
The assignment includes several phases and culminates in a student-made video. The first phase of the assignment has students explore sweatshops through video, class discussion and a short writing assignment. The research material provided is intentionally focused on Nike‰Ûªs sweatshops so that students can narrow their focus to a particular instance of sweatshop usage in order to more readily formulate a company-specific response in their roles as CRO for Nike. Once the research phase is complete, students are asked to make a video explaining the issue to Nike in the role of a CRO. The students have to think about Nike‰Ûªs role as a business, the ethical issues of sweatshops and the ways in which they can address the issues. Students work on the assignment during the last third of the semester, and the assignment takes approximately 2 or 3 class hours. To make it manageable, I created an ePortfolio assignment template since students are required to post part of it on ePortfolio. The assignment is used as a final in my classes and worth 20 % of the overall grade. I grade it according to the College‰Ûªs Competency rubric, which is discussed earlier in the semester to ensure that students are familiar with the rubric. Finally, there are a variety of ways to use the existing materials. While the assignment is meant to address the Global Learning Competency and Digital Communication Ability, it also offers opportunities to support the Oral and Written Communication Abilities.

Students use the O*Net and Occupational Outlook Handbook websites to research careers.
Supplemental handout: Definition of Business Trends

Two of the core competencies designated for The First Year Seminar Liberal Arts Math and Science (LMF 101) course are Integrative Learning and Global Learning along with oral communication. These abilities are exercised by students in the Career/Interview Presentation project. The main goal of the assignment is to promote student networking within the scientific community through interviews with an expert in the field. Also the FYS students will conduct background research about their career choices and use their findings to determine if they can be realized when interviewing a professional. The assignment is scaffolded whereby students will learn to use on-line resources to search for information about the profession and use on-line tools to material in preparation for the interview. Students will learn how to write professional emails, network and create PowerPoint slides. After the class presentation, students are asked to write a reflection in their ePortfolio on their career choice and interview experiences. The time dedicated for this project is on the order of weeks and counts for 20% (15% oral presentation and 5 % reflection) of the final grade.

The assignment Interview with a Bilingual: Case Study is a midterm, high-stakes written research paper in ELN101: Introduction to Bilingualism, a course contributing one deposit into the Global Learning Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. The assignment calls for the consideration and application of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic concepts into the discussion of individual multilingualism. By completing this assignment, students gain a deeper understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity in the US society. They learn to position issues in bilingualism against a global backdrop through the consideration of an individual bilingual journey as representative of similar histories and perspectives elsewhere. As such, the assignment asks students to approach the challenges and opportunities afforded by multilingual experience from multiple perspectives and engage with issues of diversity, identity, power, and privilege.
ELN101: Introduction to Bilingualism is a course housed in the Linguistics Program in the Department of Education and Language Acquisition. It is a writing-intensive, urban study, ePortfolio course offered in two modalities ‰ÛÒ face-to-face and hybrid. The course also fulfills LaGuardia‰Ûªs urban study graduation requirement. ELN 101 is depositing for Liberal Arts: Social Science & Humanities and four options in Liberal Arts at the midpoint for the Global Learning Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. Students in the course have typically taken the ENG 101-102 sequence and many liberal arts majors are concurrently enrolled in ENG 103: The Research Paper. The ENG sequence of courses provides an introduction to the skill of writing with power and clarity ‰ÛÒ the ability to combine vocabulary with grammatical proficiency, fluency, and cogent organization. The ELN 101 course, also attracting diverse cohorts of students from outside the Liberal Arts majors, including Business, Computer Science, and Natural Science majors, continues this task of teaching writing in the liberal arts tradition, emphasizing, in turn, the writing conventions of social sciences.
The assignment Interview with a Bilingual: Case Study takes several weeks to complete as it incorporates an authentic primary research experience for community college students. Students are introduced to the qualitative research paradigm through the case study methodology. To complete the assignment, students design an interview scheme, conduct individual interviews, analyze data, and present findings in written case study reports. The assignment is worth 15% of the final grade. The assignment in its earlier and the revised versions has been implemented in ELN 101 for a number of years. For the majority of students taking the course this is one of the highlights of the course because, typically, they interview bilinguals who have been in their lives (i.e., friends and relatives). Students report learning unexpected, new, and surprising facts and events from the lives of their intimate friends and family members. Students also report enjoying primary research experience afforded by this assignment, usually their first experience analyzing primary data in a college class. By the same token, being the first-time experience, data analysis poses the biggest challenge in the assignment and is accompanied by multiple staged assignments during which students receive ongoing feedback from the instructor.
The assignment in its final version has benefitted from the feedback of LaGuardia colleagues coordinating and participating in the Learning Matters Mini-Grant 2018-2019.
LaGuardia‰Ûªs Core Competencies and Communication Abilities

The Changing Face of Food is an assignment developed for the SCN 240 Food and Culture course tagged as a pathways course in the Urban Studies discipline and is designated Writing Intensive. The assignment also fulfills the Global Learning Core-Competency and Written Ability. It is a high stakes assignment, accounting for 20% of the final course grade and is located at the capstone level of the Nutrition and Culinary Management Program's Core Competency program curriculum map.
The purpose of the assignment is to help students explore and understand the changing food culture in the United States (US), New York State (NYS), New York City (NYC) and abroad where students cover topics related to the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) seed supplier giant, heirloom foods, major food companies that shaped food choices, organic farming, Slow Food Movement (SFM), Farm to Table initiative, food insecurity, Supplemental Food and Nutrition Program (SNAP), and Single Stop on Campus. This assignment has evolved based on feedback from the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) and the Global Learning Charrettes workshops held at LaGuardia Community College. Feedback from WID led to the provision of a letter grade to each draft reflective of the quality of work. This is particularly useful to students who do better with more concrete criteria to assess their progress. Additionally, providing clarity on the expectations for each draft served well because it was more effective to grade a smaller portion of the students work by focusing on areas for improvement rather than repeatedly having to correct consistent errors throughout the paper. Feedback from the Global Learning Charrettes, led to the tweaking of an assignment question in order to improve the ability for students to score on the rubric. For instance, in the updated assignment, students additionally explain Monsanto's monopoly on the sale of seeds to farmers in US and abroad and identify its heavy impact (such as the mass suicides of farmers in India and lawsuits regarding re-use of seeds etc.) LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities Main Course Learning Objectives: Research the impact of large business on agriculture. Review the impact of advertising on the US food voice/culture. Learn about the origins, and philosophy of the Slow Food Movement and its impact in the US. Explore the Farm to Table Initiative in NYS/NYC. Examine food insecurity in the NYS/NYC. Practice the use of in-text and end of paper citations in the APA format. Articulate personal thoughts and opinions through a reflection on topics researched.

One of the major components of the First Year Seminar in Natural Sciences (NSF101) is to introduce students to library research. The library orientation session exposes students to library resources such as books, videos, journals, databases. The "Choosing Your Career" assignment reinforces using the library by searching for information on a career, retrieving sources from select databases and evaluating the information found in a written reflection. Reflection questions are added to guide the student in their search and their approach to their career choice.
The goal is to integrate library literacy as part of their developing college learning skills. This assignment effectively introduces information literacy as the ability to find and use information and critically think about the information found when deciding on a career path.
This assignment consists of the following;
90-minute library orientation session (one lecture session)
followed up by library research (students' time)
initial draft (hard copy for instructor comments)
written revision (students' time)
a final written 1500-word research reflection. (deposited on student ePortfolio)
Objectives
1. Identify one science profession that interests you
2. Research the profession using library resources
3. Write a 1500-word reflection including the questions posed

ENG295 World Literatures Written in English is the capstone course for the Writing and Literature major. Students in their final year at LaGuardia take the course before many of them move on to English programs at Hunter, Queens, Brooklyn, and City Colleges. This section of the course focused on South African literature from right before the fall of Apartheid (1990) through the present. Throughout the semester, we discussed the question of individual responsibility in relation to the readings, particularly in Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night and JM Coetzee's Disgrace. These particular texts brought up questions of how we deal with stories of unspeakable trauma and what is the price that society has to pay in order to overcome them. The ethics of individual responsibility is central to these texts. In addition, we also had a guest speaker who visited the class and graciously told us the story of her own upbringing in Apartheid South Africa. Her descriptions of the way skin and hair became markers of racial categorization held resonance in the United States' own history of racial oppression. I thought these discussions would culminate in an in-class reflective essay that would allow the students to make connections between their own experiences and those that they read and heard about coming from the other side of the world. The glue that would bind South Africa and the United States was a poem by Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. The concrete experience of micro-aggression captured in the small prose poem would allow the students to compare and contrast the systematic oppression of South Africa and the current pernicious and pervasive forms of racism present in our own society. This reflective essay would be an opportunity for the students to synthesize the discussions and readings from throughout the semester and bring it back to their own experience. In the end, the assignment captured all three of the dimensions found in the Global Learning Competency and expected students to demonstrate advanced the writing skills.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
Main Course Learning Objectives: Enable students to understand evolving literary traditions in the global context. Compare and contrast historical and social periods across geo-political boundaries. Enable students to compare and contrast historical and social periods across geo-political boundaries. Reinforce and develop research and writing skills acquired in English 101 and 102. Reinforce and develop critical thinking skills needed to interpret and analyze literary texts.

This assignment is designed for First Year Seminar -- Liberal Arts: Humanities and Social Science majors.
The main course objectives addressed are that students: Demonstrate engagement in the life of the college and their use of key academic support services, advisement, and co-curricular organizations and activities critical to meeting those goals. Show growing mastery of the writing, reading, and speaking skills, as well as the study and management strategies essential for college success.
The primary purposes of this written and oral report are to encourage students to discover and use the campus resources and co-curricular opportunities critical for their success at LaGuardia and to further their skill in public speaking and writing. But it also goes a long way in helping students who have trouble participating in class to speak up and to practice public speaking in preparation for the PowerPoint presentation they will give at the end of the semester. In addition, the roundtable discussion offers guided practice in active listening and note-taking, underscores the habit of interdependent thinking and learning, and fosters classroom community by giving students a chance to hear about and respond to one another‰Ûªs interests and concerns.
Scaffolding: Students are introduced to college resources in the lecture and in an ePortfolio exercise and scavenger hunt that asks them to visit the Health Center, Writing Center, and other offices where they can get help. They then attend our college club fair, Spring Fest, together as a class, and in the lecture practice using journalism‰Ûªs 5 W‰Ûªs to gather information and write a report. For the roundtable discussion, the whole class is seated in a circle and before giving their individual reports, students share tips on effective public speaking and active listening. They also are directed to fill out the attached active listening worksheet and ask at least one question, and are encouraged to be supportive of classmates. Listening, writing, and speaking are included in the evaluation of the report. (See the rubric, attached.) The idea of interdependent learning is also highlighted in a class discussion of the required text, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, as we consider what promotes the protagonist‰Ûªs success and the role that assistance plays in every hero‰Ûªs quest. Finally, students discuss the campus resources and co-curricular activities that helped them in a final reflection essay at term‰Ûªs end.
This assignment is worth 10% of the final grade. It takes approximately 2 weeks to complete. Each student presentation lasts 3-5 minutes.

This assignment was developed for students in SYF 101 Psychology who attend a 1-hour library session. This session is aligned with the Inquiry and Problem Solving core competency in terms of exposing students to Searching as Strategic Exploration and the Integrative Learning core competency in terms of analyzing Scholarship as a Conversation. In the first of two parts, this session will focus on building subject knowledge and finding background information in encyclopedias. Students will learn how encyclopedias can offer different perspectives on the same topic; they will also create an APA citation for an encyclopedia entry. In order to gain a better understanding of subject knowledge students will create a concept map on ADHD or a topic related to their assignment, which will also help students narrow a research topic from general to specific. After covering background information in Part 1, students will discuss the difference between news, popular, and scholarly sources as it relates to their research. Information from diverse sources will be examined as existing on a spectrum, rather than in a hierarchy. As a result, students will begin to understand scholarship as a conversation and that different sources meet different research needs. Students will also be introduced to a discipline-specific database like Psych INFO. Again, citation will be covered, this time for scholarly articles. LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities Main Course Learning Objectives: Students will be introduced to the concept of library academic resources Students will learn the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of information

This is a youth to youth guide to the GED. Written for and by youth it is a learner-centered tool for understand choices and options around the GED.

This is the course shell for the fully online OER class used to train CUNY faculty in OER implementation. It includes five modules plus a final project. The modules are: Class introduction An Introduction to Open Education Resources Finding and Evaluating Open Education Resources Using Open Education Resources in Your Class Creating and Hosting Your Own Open Education Resources
Discussion prompts are included as a separate document.

This ENG 102 assignment was developed in the context of CTL sponsored Learning Matters Mini-grant awarded to the English Department. The primary purpose was to assist full-time and part-time faculty in the Department with revising ENG 102 course materials to align with the Inquiry and Problem Solving (IPS) Core Competency and Written Communication Ability. This goal was achieved through several workshops, a programmatic benchmark reading, and a two-phase departmental review process that prepared assignments to be submitted to the Learning Matters Assignment Library. The mini-grant has been invaluable in helping to bring both full-time and adjunct faculty into departmental conversations about composition course requirements and how they align with LaGuardia‰Ûªs core competencies, the role of the competencies in the curriculum review process, and more generally the importance of the competencies and abilities in the college‰Ûªs general education requirements.
ENG 102: Composition II is a required course for most LaGuardia students that builds and intensifies the training received in Composition I. Most students enrolled in ENG 102 are non-majors, and are upper-freshman or lower-sophomores, although occasionally students may take the course later in their career. In addition to continuing to develop critical reading, writing, and research skills, in ENG 102 students are introduced to the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama. Students also learn close reading techniques and are introduced to forms of literary analysis such as historical context. ENG 102 is a baseline course for the Inquiry and Problem Solving (IPS) Core Competency and Written Communication Ability.
One concept I repeatedly discuss ENG 102 is the notion that academic writing is a form of joining an existing conversation on a subject or issue. The following Critical Research Paper Assignment encourages students to continue and expand our class discussion on the effects of deindustrialization in the America‰Ûªs Rust Belt in the 21st century. The primary literary text students analyze in this assignment is Lynn Nottage‰Ûªs 2017 Pulitzer-Prize winner Broadway play Sweat. In order to provide students with a stronger historical and ethnographic context for their reading of Nottage‰Ûªs play, students were also assigned to read several chapters of Chad Broughton‰Ûªs book Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities (2015).
The Critical Research Paper is a scaffolded assignment that students worked on for 3-4 weeks of the semester. This included one week (about two weeks into the process) where students engaged in peer review workshops in which they meet in groups of 4-5 students with the instructor for 30 minutes to review and discuss the first drafts of their essays. The Critical Research Paper constituted 30% of students‰Ûª final grade in the course. This includes credit received for all scaffolded sections of the essay, as well as participation in peer review workshops.
LaGuardia‰Ûªs Core Competencies and Communication Abilities
The Critical Research Paper meets several of the course‰Ûªs instructional and performance objectives, including practicing writing as a process by completing multiple drafts and revisions. Engaging in close reading strategies and using historical context as a literary analysis methodology. As well as demonstrating research skills through the ability to gather, evaluate, synthesize, and cite primary and secondary sources. Furthermore, these performance objectives overlap with the dimensions of the Inquiry and Problem Solving (IPS) core competency rubric, as the assignment asks students to frame an issue through the thesis statement and argument they develop, to gather evidence to support their assertions, to analyze through their close reading of passages of literature, and finally to draw conclusions based on their analysis.

I have used this high-stakes assignment in the last four semesters, in the ELS103 Intermediate Spanish I class. However, it was considerably revised during two Center for Teaching and Learning sponsored seminars at LaGuardia Community College: "Bringing Global Learning Competency into Your Class" and "The Pedagogy of the Digital Ability." These seminars allowed me to have a better understanding about how to scrutinize contexts in order to bring assignments closer to the Global Learning Core Competency and the Digital Communication Ability. The "Bringing Global Learning Competency into Your Class" seminar in particular shaped my thinking about the design and content of this assignment, and how to take advantage of this competency in an Intermediate Modern Language class, in which, due to language constrains, students are not supposed to produce more abstract, or complex ways of thinking, both of which are more appropriate to more advanced levels of the language. But when preparing these assignments about Latin American artists of the 20th and 21th centuries, students have to research different historical contexts, and aesthetic ideas in a given historical moment. Talking about artists' lives and work will give them an opportunity to learn about global issues. They will become more aware of themselves as global citizens, since most of these Latin American artists had to deal with global issues related to national identity, how to earn a living, traveling, surviving in a foreign cultural environment, and in mainstream, European or American hegemonic cultural centers. This assignment could help students understand how our lived experiences are not that different from others around the world and in different historical contexts.
This is an intermediate level Spanish class where, by the end of the semester, students should know how to use the main verb tenses in Spanish, as well as being able to describe things, such as the weather, people, and certain landscapes. Taking the "Bringing Global Learning Competency into Your Class," convinced me that I can take advantage of the Global Learning Rubric and apply it to an intermediate level language class, as far as I could adapt it to the needs of the students. On the other hand, the "The Pedagogy of the Digital Ability" seminar showed me the possibilities of going beyond power point presentations, and asking students about using other digital media, such as audio or video recordings. The assignment, which is in Spanish (for non-Spanish speaking users, the version here is translated into English), focuses on digital literacy, builds on students' existing skills such as preparing power point presentations and doing online research. The assignment might also help students to become familiar with topics that are developed in other, more advanced, levels of the Spanish language, where issues related to art and literature are frequently discussed. The oral presentations, seen as a whole, intend to render an overview of Latin American art.
LaGuardia's Core Competencies and Communication Abilities