Case Studies

View All Case Studies

Hillsborough Community College

Textbooks in Use with MathXL

College Algebra Essentials, 2e, 2007, Blitzer

MathXL Course Structure

Course Design

Students meet in a traditional, on-campus classroom twice a week for 75 minutes each.

Assessments

Students have firm due dates for homework assignments, and all assignments for each section are due prior to the corresponding test date.

Testing is via paper and pencil in an on-campus classroom. The final grade is determined as follows:

60 percent	Four tests
20 percent	Final exam
17.5 percent	Homework
2.5 percent	Attendance

MathXL Implementation

All homework is done online in MathXL and contributes 17.5 percent to each student’s final course grade. Some students use the Study Plan, but it is not required.

Homework scores and averages are tracked in the MathXL gradebook. Test scores (from paper-and-pencil tests) are input into the gradebook as an off-line item.

MathXL Course Results

	Without MathXL	With MathXL
Average Final Grade	72.5	78.1
Average Test Score	75.3	78.1
Average Homework Score	79.0	84.5
Percentage of All Students Who Earned an A*	22.9%	37.0%
Percentage of All Students Who Earned an A, B, or C*	72.4%	78.3%
Percentage of Students Who Completed the Course**	92.4%	91.8%
Percentage of As for Students Who Completed the Course**	24.8%	40.3%
Percentage of As, Bs and Cs for Students Who Completed the Course**	78.4%	85.3%

Table 1. Student Data before and after MathXL Implementation
*"All Students" includes every student whose name appeared on the end-of-semester roster, including students who stopped attending class but did not withdraw from the course.
**"Students Who Completed the Course" refers only to those students who attended the class until the end of the semester and took the final exam.

Conclusions

As illustrated in Table 1, the most dramatic change seen at Hillsborough Community College is the increase in the percentage of As received by students using MathXL versus those not using MathXL: an increase of nearly 15 percent. As MathXL is almost exclusively used for homework, the data indicates that those who do more homework retain the information better and achieve better grades than those who do not. The use of MathXL contributed to a nearly six-point increase in homework scores, an approximately three-point increase in test scores, a six-point increase in the pass rate percentage of all students (including those who stopped attending but did not withdraw), and a seven-point increase in the pass rate percentage of those students who completed the course.

Instructor Brooke Quinlan reports that her students are excited to use the program and they say that they think they passed "because of MathXL." She intends to use MathXL "as long as the department chooses a Pearson textbook."

Hillsborough Community College

School Years:	2
Courses:	College Algebra
Environment:	Traditional
Type of Data:	Success Rates
Date	Fall 2004 - Summer 2007