We’re making it even easier for you to build assignments and quizzes in Mastering that accurately test your students’ understanding of the material you’re teaching them. We’re making enhancements to Pearson’s Mastering platform this summer to give you even more choice in how you assign homework to your students making it even harder for students to try and improve their score through less than honest means.
Here’s what is included in our summer release:
· Randomized question order in an assignment
o The questions you select for a homework assignment or quiz can be presented to students in a random order. The assignment or quiz as a whole remains the same but the effort required to cheat goes up significantly.
· Hide item titles
o One of the key ways that students are able to get unfair help in completing their homework assignment is to Google the item title. Hiding the end-of-chapter question titles makes it much harder for students to find the answers to these questions online or in solutions manuals.
· Password protection
o You can password-protect a proctored quiz or test before administering it, ensuring that students only see the material during the designated test period.
· Locking of assignments
o Once a student completes an assignment, your approval is required for the student to revisit the assignment before the due date has passed, preventing students from referring to a peer’s completed assignment and going back to change their own answers.
· Rework for credit
o You have the option of resetting students’ work on a Mastering assignment, allowing them to re-do the assignment for a new score when students have a legitimate reason for not having completed the assignment on time or for scoring poorly on a completed assignment.
· Learning Outcomes
o As well as being able to create your own Learning Outcomes to associate with problems in an assignment, you can select from a large number of publisher-provided Learning Outcomes. Most of the titles in Mastering have had its content tagged to Learning Outcomes, that you can edit, making it even easier for you to assess your students’ understanding against selected Learning Outcomes.
· Mobile
o You can now view selected eTexts on the iPad. All titles will be available going forward, and additional titles, previously published, will be converted on a case-by-case basis.
o Your students will be able to receive announcements from you on their smartphones or tablet devices.
The new features coming with the summer release will allow you to be even more confident that the assignments and quizzes you are creating in Mastering are really testing your students’ comprehension of the material you are teaching.
Which feature of your Mastering product do you find most affects student success? Which feature helps you the most?
Unfortunately, I'm not a Mastering user (although I wish I were! These features sound amazing!). I imagine if these features were available in MWL, I (and my students) would take advantage of the Mobile option, as we already are using Twitter and Google Chat in class.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to the randomized question order in an assignment and hide item titles.
ReplyDeleteI am hopeful these will reduce the few students each semester that complete the problems in less time than it takes most students to read the question. That should help those students when it comes time for an in-class exam.
The learning outcomes should also be helpful for our assessment procedures and could result in time savings for the committee.
The feature of MasteringAstronomy that I find most affects student success is the set of Guided Tutorials. Each semester, these always generate a handful of "wow, I really learned something while enjoying myself" comments. It is a shame that the Guided Tutorials don't integrate better with Mastering.
ReplyDeleteI anticipate that being able to randomize items within an assignment combined with locking that assignment once completed will be powerful in steering students towards doing their own work rather than copying...I am really excited about randomizing question order in an effort to use Mastering for quizzing under timed conditions!
ReplyDeleteI just got an iPad so I am interested to see how the eText "feels" on that device.
ReplyDeleteI feel like there are a lot of really nice small details in this list. Locking of assignments, rework for credit, etc., these all feel like really nice additions.