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Massachusetts Bay Community College

In summer 2010, Meredith Watts taught a six-week developmental math course designed specifically for students new to MassBay. As if the shortened timeline weren’t intense enough, all of Watts’s students were simultaneously taking a six-week developmental writing course. Watts recognized that the overlapping course schedule meant that her math students needed all the support they could get—both in and outside the classroom.

Watts turned to MyMathLab. While her students’ schedule was still grueling, the program’s round-the-clock access to homework and quizzes, videos, PowerPoint slides, animations, and individualized study plans enabled her students to obtain help whenever and wherever they needed it. Students who took advantage of MyMathLab’s learning tools found that their hard work paid off. Seventy-three percent of Watts’s students passed the course. And after retaking the math placement test, of those who passed the course, 64 percent placed into a higher-level, skipping either one or two math levels.

The strong connection between developmental math success and college graduation makes this story more than just a tale about increased student self-confidence, learning how to learn, or saving time and money. Thanks to MyMathLab, a six-week course that had been originally
designed simply to jump-start students’ freshman year ended up propelling them toward graduation.

—Submitted by Meredith Watts, Assistant Professor of Mathematics