Course Info:

Traditional course taught on campus. This course is comprised mostly of biology majors. It is a required course targeted at second semester juniors. There is a lab component.

Assessment:

Most of the credit is earned through three or four exams given throughout the semester. MasteringBiology is a component of the participation requirement; and it is worth 5%. Thus, MasteringBiology wasn't optional.

MasteringBiology Implementation:

For each of the chapters, two or three assignments were created. An assignment was a mix of content comprising of Activities, Tutorials and Quizzes. Depending on the emphasis of the chapter, I would select from the Tutorials or Activities. However, every assignment included quizzes or test bank items. As a motivational device, a few quiz or test items were repeated on the exam.

Early on, I looked at the diagnostics data for the first few chapters. The time data was helpful in constructing assignments. Students were told approximately how long an assignment might take. However, there was a lot of variability in my student time data, so the post data analysis was not used.

Students were not graded on their accuracy of getting the items correct. They were rewarded for their honest attempt.

Trends:

For some students (visual learners, in particular) MasteringBiology was extremely helpful. For example, How a Neuron Works BioFlix Tutorial was very useful. Student feedback was both positive and negative. For some students it was very helpful, but for others it was not helpful. Overall, I think MasteringBiology made a positive difference.

Conclusions:

The Tutorial items that contained hints help students help themselves. These logically structured hints were the best part of the program. I never used the previous online media that came with the textbook before because those questions lacked the useful hints found in MasteringBiology.

I will use MasteringBiology again. Recently, a new feature was added, allowing students to re-work an item for practice. I will create assignments and set due dates to make use of this re-work option.