On behalf of the students, faculty and staff of Keene State College, I am pleased to welcome you to our campus for the 2019 Northeast Regional Undergraduate Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity (URSCA) Conference of COPLAC, the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. This annual event provides the opportunity for northeastern COPLAC member institutions to celebrate the very best in faculty-mentored undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative endeavors.
The twenty-nine COPLAC member institutions are unified by their commitment to liberal arts and sciences, public education, and our student-centered missions, preparing students to be engaged citizens, lifelong learners, and adaptable to careers yet to emerge. COPLAC’s annual showcase of undergraduate research illustrates our shared commitment to high impact practices, including faculty mentorship, and establishes a broader community of peers for student networking and support.
Keene State College is proud to be a founding COPLAC institution. Our commitment to liberal arts education and the teacher-scholar-mentor model is the essence of the undergraduate experience on our campus. We are fortunate to have our COPLAC peer institutions standing with us and exemplifying the richness of the public liberal arts.
Our commitment to the liberal arts can be seen in the Putnam Science Center, where undergrads pursue research with a bio-medical focus; and in the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, currently exhibiting “This is Country,” a photo collection curated from Florentine Film’s most recent documentary series, Country Music, with an exhibit catalogue created by Keene State intern. In every building across campus, much like your own campuses, students and faculty are invested in collaboration, discovery, and making meaningful contributions as engaged citizens.
Thank you for being here and for supporting one another. Please join me in sincere appreciation to our colleagues at COPLAC for making all of this possible. We hope this conference provides you with inspiration, connections, and encouragement as you continue in your academic pursuits.
Sincerely, Melinda D. Treadwell, President, Keene State College
Application of Adaptive Learning to Programming in Java Adrian Arjoon Faculty mentor: Jian Lin Eastern Connecticut State University A common challenge educators face is providing students with practice to learn concepts without repeating unnecessary work. I developed an adaptive learning framework that takes advantage of adaptive learning solutions to enable students to effectively practice and master specific skills. This framework focuses on skill acquisition and reinforcement by having a set of practice problems, breaking them down into simple concepts, and ordering them based on their prerequisite relationship. The system starts with an initial assessment to determine what the students already know and creates a curriculum map to show and track their learning progress. As students work through problems, the system will continuously adapt to personalize the practice based on how long they take to solve each problem correctly, how many times they have attempted a problem, and how often they have requested hints. I showed how to apply the adaptive solution to learning programming in Java. Adrian Arjoon is from Buford, Georgia and is a Computer Science and Business Economics double major. After graduation Arjoon plans to join the work force as either a software developer or business analyst.
