I hear many instructors lamenting that their students are not doing their homework to the instructor’s satisfaction. If we agree that homework is an important part of the learning process, then it is important to tackle this problem. Do your students know why they are doing homework? Don’t be so sure that they do. Many students do it because it’s part of the game, because they are told to do it, because they get points for doing it. They should…
Looking forward to my session on the importance of student discovery in developmental math at ICTCM this weekend in Atlanta. I will be sharing innovative approaches for getting your students involved in the discovery of material. When students are engaged and thinking the chances for understanding and success dramatically increase. The session is on Saturday morning from 9-9:30. I will be walking through Interactive Statistics in the exhibitor’s room from 10-10:30 on Friday morning. This is the new product I…
One thing I like to do in class is end with a short assignment to see how well students understand the material from that section. There are a couple of short quizzes that are available in the 4th edition of my combined elementary & intermediate algebra textbook. First, in the Video Notebook (located for students inside MyMathLab) each section of the notebook ends with a 5-question self-assessment quiz that works really well for this purpose. I selected 5 problems that…
As my students are getting ready for their final exam, I assign a MyMathLab quiz that is connected to a personalized homework assignment. There are 36 questions on the quiz, with 136 related questions on the homework assignment. For each question a student gets right on the quiz, all related problems (typically 4) are removed from the homework assignment. This allows students to focus on the problems they struggled with, which is one of the most important factors in preparing…
The first article has been posted to George Woodbury’s MyMathLab Corner on the Pearson Instructor Exchange. You can check it out here … Getting the Most Out of Online Homework
This week I am starting a new feature on the Instructor Exchange, tentatively titled George Woodbury’s MyMathLab Corner. The plan is to post an article on the effective use of MyMathLab each month. In the first article I will outline what I view as the key benefits of using online homework, as well as potential pitfalls. In upcoming articles I will discuss how I handle these problems. I will post here once the article goes live. – George