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Northeast Illinois University

Ivan Temesvari, mathematics instructor, used MyMathLab in his six-week summer prealgebra course. The course met for three hours twice a week in a lecture/lab room that provided each student with access to a computer. In addition, students were required to attend a three-hour peer-led group/individual activity after each lecture/lab session.

MyMathLab was used for homework, weekly quizzes, practice exercises, and practice tests. After each quiz, students could practice the problems found in their Study Plans until they had obtained mastery. Quizzes could be retaken as many times as necessary until a score of 100 percent was achieved.

Temesvari was particularly interested in observing the correlation between homework completion and student success in the course. When he compared his data at the end of the course, he liked what he saw. “I found a strong linear correlation between students’ course grades and their cumulative MyMathLab homework scores,” he says. “I believe that the addition of the program was the primary contributor to this summer’s increased levels of performance and higher success rates. Not only did the program enable us to identify struggling students before they fell too far behind, but also the increased amount of practice enabled some students to jump ahead one level in developmental mathematics.”

Student surveys indicate that in addition to doing well in the class, Temesvari’s students “all really enjoyed it.” “Sometimes [students] would beg for more work in order to practice,” he says. “We saw a huge increase in their confidence through the six weeks of the course.”

As a result of MyMathLab’s positive impact, Temesvari plans to introduce more of the program’s practice exercises during lab time and is exploring generating homework directly from the mastery-level prequizzes.

—Submitted by Ivan Temesvari, Mathematics Instructor