Teaching Tip: Using Personalized Homework

By Tim Britt, Jackson State Community College

For a long time, I have wished, as many of you have, that I could assign extra homework to each student based on their individual performance. The new personalized homework feature now allows me to do just that and I am so excited! Let me explain how I use the feature and how it is working for me and my students in my Statistics and Probability online course.

My course consists of four modules and includes a midterm and a final. I first create a practice quiz that includes the competencies that I want the students to master for a particular module. This quiz comes after all the regular homework and other required activities. The practice quiz does not have any learning aids available for the student. Based on the performance on this quiz, a personalized homework set is created for each student with their missed competency questions marked to complete. I require the student to do the generated homework (with the learning aids available) and make 100 percent before they can proceed to the unit quiz. This allows the students to review what they missed, determine what competencies they are weak in and to rework those competencies. This has really helped the performance of the students in both grades and attitudes.

The personalized homework generation is an easy task to add to your MML flow. I created a new quiz from my existing quiz and called it a practice quiz. Then when you create a new homework assignment you have an option on the first screen to generate the homework from an existing quiz or test. That’s it! You then have the option to add or delete other problems to the generated homework if you wish. You also can enable or disable any of the learning aids based on your preferences. Some instructors like them and some don’t.

My students are responding very well to the new generated homework. They like the review part of the process and getting to “rework” the missed problems before they take the actual quiz over the material.

I have encouraged other instructors at my institution to use this feature and they are now beginning to use it and love it.

Teaching Tip: Using StatCrunch with MyStatLab

By Michael Sullivan, Joliet Junior College

StatCrunch is a dynamic, online data analysis tool (plus a whole lot more). Did you know that StatCrunch is available to you and your students with their MyStatLab login? Because of the MyStatLab/StatCrunch partnership, I have been able to restructure my entire class and deliver the material in a fashion that is more in tune with my philosophy of statistical education.

I structure my class so that some homework is done in MyStatLab. The focus of these assignments is to get students comfortable with the computational aspects of statistics – that is, the goal is to generate the output required for any statistical analysis. For example, students can complete homework in MyStatLab by drawing scatter diagrams and determining Pearson’s correlation coefficient utilizing the power of StatCrunch as a statistical calculator. I like that each student gets an algorithmically generated data set based on the problem from the text. I also like that MyStatLab includes a button () located in the upper, right-hand corner of the data table that can be clicked so that the entire data set gets loaded into StatCrunch. This eliminates the potential for data entry error. I reserve traditional paper/pencil homework where I ask my students to complete problems from the text. They copy output from StatCrunch and paste it into a Word document to be submitted. The paper/pencil homework also allows me to focus on conceptual questions such as why correlation explains the strength of linear relation between two quantitative variables. For a really neat educational experience, I would recommend requiring students to post their results in a StatCrunch report.

In addition, StatCrunch has allowed me to rethink the way I assess students. Because my course focuses less on by-hand computation, I give my exams in two parts. Part I of the exam is administered in MyStatLab. Students may take the exam in the comfort of their own home and use StatCrunch to generate the results needed to answer questions. Part II of the exam (and the one with more weight in determining the final exam grade) requires students to analyze output and explain statistical concepts. There is no computation on the second part of the exam. I envision this form of assessment changing in the future because I hope to start teaching the course in a computer lab – this will allow for computational and conceptual assessment on one exam!

This is a regular column in the newsletter where selected questions from educators are answered by Training Consultant Irene Doo. You can pose questions you may have about MyMathLab, MyStatLab, MathXL, or MyMathTest by emailing Irene at irene.doo@pearsoned.com

	I love the ability to copy and edit questions from the textbook question bank. It really helps me customize my homework assignments to match the way I teach the course. However, I am having a hard time finding enough variety of questions from my textbook. Is there any way I can copy and edit questions from another textbook? Rene
	Hi Rene, Hi Rene, Yes, you can copy and edit questions from any math and statistics textbook published by Pearson Education. You must first create a course from the textbook. Then, navigate the Homework/Test Manager and select Create Assignment >> Create Custom Question. In the Custom Question Manager, click Create New Question. Select the first option to “Copy and edit a question from your online course” and click Next. In Step 2, click the Book dropdown list to select the textbook. You can then select the chapter, section, or objective to view the list of available questions you can copy.
	I teach three sections of a Finite Math course and I have several helpers (interns, teaching assistants and graders) that need access to each of my MyMathLab course sections. The interns need to have more access than the teaching assistants or graders. How do I assign varying course access to each group? Margaret
	Hi Margaret First of all, you need to enroll each of the interns, teaching assistants, and graders into your courses as students. Contact your Pearson textbook representative to obtain student access codes so that you can create accounts for your helpers and enroll them in your courses. Once they are enrolled in a course, go to the Control Panel for that course and click List/Modify Users. On this page, click the Search button to list all of the students in your course. Check the “SEC INSTR ACCESS” box next to each helper’s name. This will promote them to “Section Instructor” in your course. Next, you need to assign the appropriate level of course access to each helper. Go to the Control Panel and click on Gradebook in the MyMathLab section. In the Gradebook, click on Edit Roster. In the Edit Roster page, you will see the list of Section Instructors in your course. There are four course access levels you can set: Full instructor, Section instructor, Read-only, and Custom. Click the Access dropdown list for each Section Instructor to select the access level. If you select the Custom Access level, you can define the custom access privileges, as shown below.
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