Course Info:

Traditional courses taught on campus.

BI 105 is a one-semester course. Its student body is primarily made up of pre-pharmacy students. There is no lab component.

BI 122 is a two-semester course. Its student body is comprised of biology majors. There is a lab component.

Assessment:

The semester is comprised of 440 points. Three exams are worth 80 points each. The final is worth 120 points. MasteringBiology accounts for 80 points (or roughly 18% of the course grades).

MasteringBiology Implementation:

MasteringBiology is a required component of the course. Most assignments are built to be about 20-30 minutes duration. Weekly assignments are comprised mainly of Tutorial and Activities, rather than multiple-choice type questions. Students are expected to read the text and to do online activities. I'm still in the process of modifying the grading policy in order to encourage active student participation. For instance, to prevent students from just guessing, I'm docking a small percentage of points for wrong answers. Currently, students lose about 10% for every wrong answer and are given 5 attempts. This grading policy makes them think carefully before just submitting any answer.

Trends:

It's hard to quantify the effect of MasteringBiology, but there is a trend that students who do well in their MasteringBiology assignments also do well on their exams. I like to use the MasteringBiology diagnostic information to track how much time my students are spending. By going to the gradebook, I'll filter the data to see the time stamp data. I find the time data especially valuable if I have a struggling student because MasteringBiology gives me a way to ascertain how much time the student is spent on study outside of the classroom.

Conclusions:

I've really liked using MasteringBiology; it is valuable. Making students accountable by doing homework is useful. I've had some student complaints about certain question items. Some of the Activities go into a greater level of detail than I expect the students to know. I've found it helpful to do each of the assigned items before the students do them.

I will continue using MasteringBiology in future courses. It has replaced my in-class quizzes. The quizzes used to take up valuable class time. By assigning homework online instead, I can track what students are doing outside of class. Furthermore, it gives me more time in class to go over difficult concepts and more time to answer questions. Overall, MasteringBiology has been a positive experience.