August 5, 2020
Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders Yan Yu, Ph.D., ‘05G has made contributions to student success in and beyond St. John’s University. During summer 2019, she developed and ran a free summer camp for 100 New York City seventh and eighth grade children to enhance their public speaking and standardized test preparation. This year, she held the summer camp again, this time fully online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The free summer camp grew out of Dr. Yu’s desire to create a community academic resource for students in New York City schools. In 2019, the five-week free camp (four half days per week), which was held in three locations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, provided public speaking training as well as English reading and math practice to seventh and eighth graders. More than 100 students registered, representing all five boroughs, and many of them from new immigrant families. Dr. Yu designed the curriculum, selected, and trained 38 teaching assistants (TAs) from New York City’s top high schools to lead the instruction.
To find space to hold the camp sessions, Dr. Yu reached out to New York Assemblyman William Colton ‘68C, a fellow St. John’s alumnus. He and other public representatives helped her locate classrooms in each borough. This five-week free academic program saved the 100 families of participants an estimated cost of $2,500 each ($250,000 in total) and provided the 38 high school student tutors with opportunities to serve their community.
After the coronavirus pandemic left many students at home during the summer of 2020, parents began reaching out to Dr. Yu and asking her to hold the camp again. She re-organized the camp into six weeks of instruction via Zoom. Ninety-four middle school students from across the five boroughs met as a group for two hours of morning main lecture meeting and one hour of group question reviews, then broke into smaller groups for the afternoon sessions. The smaller groups were led by 73 high school TAs, all of whom have been receiving ongoing pedagogical training by Dr. Yu and some TA leaders.
On Friday afternoons, the students practiced public speaking. The first debate topic was about mask-wearing during COVID 19, which received attention from several local news outlets in Chinese.
“The summer camp program allows students to distract themselves from the negative news of the pandemic and allows these students to continue their academic learning, and being connected with others,” said Dr. Yu. “We found the Zoom sessions to be even more effective this year because we are able to enroll students without considering the geographic restrictions, and we are able to give students more individualized attention without distracting others.”
Dr. Yu noted that running an online program allows for more spontaneous data collection and it is easier to communicate with parents about their children’s daily performance in the camp. Dr. Yu is closely monitoring student learning outcomes and will be comparing student’s progress this year to that of last year in order to evaluate the effectiveness of online learning.