Course Info:

Traditional course taught on campus. The regular course has mix of both non-major and major students, while the honors course is made up of biology or other science majors. The regular course has an enrollment size of about 1000 students of which I teach 200-300. The honors course is much smaller with a range of 11-25 students. There is a separate lab component for both courses.

Assessment:

MasteringBiology accounts for 10% of the student grades. The remaining 90% comes from three mid-term exams and one final exam.

MasteringBiology Implementation:

We saw MasteringBiology as an opportunity to provide students with a chance to get points apart from the exam. The complaint was that all points could only be earned under high stress exam conditions. So, MasteringBiology's purpose for us is twofold: 1) students get additional exposure to the material and 2) they earn points in a more relaxed learning setting.

We assigned MasteringBiology for the first time last year. We didn't create weekly assignments, but created assignments as they were needed. Assignments are mostly comprised of the Tutorial questions, although we do include some Test Bank questions on occasion. The Tutorials are useful because they provide the students with another opportunity to review the same material and in a different medium.

We learned the wisdom of extending assignments because students would be late in finishing their homework. Now the deadlines are much longer. I didn't use the provided data on duration and difficulty. Instead, I used the Gradebook scoring and exported the grades.

Trends:

I wish I had data to tell you, but I don't. Unfortunately, there is not enough time to review the program's diagnostic data. MasteringBiology does have the potential to affect student grades and performance positively because the students like it.

Conclusions:

I will use MasteringBiology again. I used MasteringBiology with another teacher to team teach. I like MasteringBiology better than clickers, largely because of tech issues with clickers, although clickers have a place as well.