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The challenge

At the University of Tampa, math students must master challenging concepts to succeed in their coursework; however, this is most often easier said than done. Students must first grasp key math fundamentals before advancing to more demanding concepts. What’s more, instructors must have the tools to identify whether students understand prerequisite content and whether they’re absorbing new material as it’s presented.

The solution

MyLab^® Math from ����app, which combines respected content with personalized engagement to help students and faculty see real results, is empowering a University of Tampa math instructor to keep his finger firmly on the pulse of his students’ mastery. The learning platform helps him make real-time adjustments to his instruction and avoid teeing up more complex concepts before his students are proficient in material he’s already delivered.

The story

Prof. Sasko Ivanov, a lecturer in mathematics at the 11,000-student private institution located in downtown Tampa, Florida, has been a loyal ����app user since before joining the school in 2010. He’s made MyLab Math a staple in the main three courses he currently teaches: College Algebra, Precalculus, and Calculus for Business.

“I'm really grateful and thankful to ����app for creating MyLab,” he says. “I find it really helpful, and I get very positive feedback from my students about how helpful it is.”

Many University of Tampa students must complete College Algebra as part of their general graduation requirements. Some students, such as nursing and pre-med majors, must take Precalculus before moving on to Calculus. Business students must take Calculus for Business.

“As part of my strategy at the beginning of each semester, I don’t assume that everyone is coming from the same knowledge background,” says Ivanov. “I review a lot of topics from College Algebra. In Calculus for Business, you’re expected to know everything about adding and subtracting fractions. In my experience, I find that’s not the case. Most students struggle with basic concepts.”

For example, Ivanov reports that more than two-thirds of students struggle with factoring — the process of finding what to multiply together to get an expression. Proficiency in the skill is essential in Calculus for Business. So Sasko takes a step back to assess where the learning gaps are and how he will try to fill them.

Learning Catalytics

Learning Catalytics, a standout feature within the MyLab Math suite, helps Ivanov identify and target key gaps. In fact, he’s integrated it into his daily class cadence.

“I love Learning Catalytics; I was so happy when I discovered it,” says Ivanov. “I get real-time feedback about what students have learned in the previous class and whether they’re prepared for the section we’re about to cover.”

The interactive student response tool allows him to rapidly deploy questions and surveys while assessing student comprehension. He uses the real-time data to fine-tune his instructional strategy for the lecture.

Ivanov typically begins each class by pushing out five questions to students via Learning Catalytics. How well the students answer the questions sets the tone for how he’ll approach the lecture.

“If I notice there’s a question that’s necessary for them to know for the next section and 80 percent of them didn’t get it right, it tells me that maybe I didn’t explain the concept the right way. So I’ll look at an alternative way to explain that concept and hopefully that will be helpful for them to grasp it so they’re ready to learn the new topic.”

The Learning Catalytics exercise normally fills the first 10 minutes of class. Ivanov may also deploy the tool at the end of a class to gauge how well students absorbed the day’s lecture material.

“It doesn’t make sense to move to the next topic if they haven’t completely understood what was covered last class,” says Sasko. “I’ll take my time to go over that concept one more time and maybe use some alternative way. Hopefully that will be more helpful for them.”

Students who miss a class appreciate the Learning Catalytics-powered quizzes because they provide an opportunity to see what they missed and get up to speed.

Taking notes

Guided Lecture Notes from ����app offer students another valuable tool for organizing and comprehending course content, says Ivanov. He encourages students to use the Notes, along with additional important material from the text, and distill them into one page for use on the final exam.

“I started experimenting with that last year, and the students really liked it,” says Sasko. “I got positive feedback that they were allowed to use those summary notes. Some of them create nice notes.”

Students must upload the notes to their learning management system (LMS), Canvas, providing Ivanov with an opportunity to review and gauge whether they’ll be helpful to the student. He’ll inform students if he doesn’t feel the notes will be helpful, providing them with an opportunity to redo them.

As an added measure, Ivanov creates an extra credit review exam with 40-50 questions to support the Guided Lecture Notes. Students can gauge their performance on the extra credit assignment to help them determine which information to include on the one-page summary they bring to the final exam.

“I hope they go over the notes and extract the most important facts from the section(s) they must remember, or maybe they have a hard time remembering, so they will find it useful on the final exam. If they can’t remember it now, how are they going to remember it on the final exam?”

A purpose-built solution for success

With the suite of features MyLab Math delivers, Ivanov and his students have a dynamic resource to guide them through challenging curricula with confidence.

Ivanov encourages his peers to adopt MyLab, creating instructional videos to help them navigate and integrate key features.

“I’m really thankful to ����app,” says Ivanov. “I think it’s a great tool. I see ����app is constantly updating their platform. They’re doing great things.”

Patrick Golden is a writer, marketing and communications specialist, and former journalist based in Massachusetts.

Like many instructors, I spent years using and teaching with the TI-83 and TI-84 Plus calculators. These devices were considered the standard in classrooms across the country. They were reliable, widely available, and supported by nearly every textbook publisher. For a long time, I had no reason to question whether they were still the best tools for the job.

That changed when my courses transitioned to fully online instruction, and I began using Honorlock to proctor my exams. The issue was not the calculator itself. The real issue was what was hidden from my view when students were using the calculator. During testing, students were often looking down, out of sight of the webcam for long periods of time. I could see their faces but not their hands or their work. From an academic integrity standpoint, this was a major problem. I had no clear way to verify what was happening just below the webcam frame.

As someone who takes academic honesty seriously, I knew I had to make a change. That change came in the form of StatCrunch.

At first, the move to StatCrunch was driven entirely by concerns about exam integrity. Because StatCrunch is accessed directly through the testing screen, students no longer had to look down or shift their focus off screen. It kept their attention on the test and within view of the webcam. This single adjustment immediately improved my ability to monitor exams and reduced the risk of students accessing unauthorized tools or materials.

An improved student experience

Exam security was a primary need. To my surprise, I found that students reported higher satisfaction with the platform. They liked that they did not have to memorize sequences of calculator key presses to run a basic statistical test. They appreciated the cleaner interface and the ability to work directly with real data sets. Many students, even those with prior experience using graphing calculators, found StatCrunch to be more intuitive and less intimidating.

Another unexpected benefit was that test completion times dropped significantly. Students were no longer slowed down by the mechanics of navigating multi-step commands on the calculator. They could get results quickly and focus more energy on interpreting those results correctly. That, in turn, allowed me to shift more of my instruction toward critical thinking. Instead of spending large portions of class time explaining how to find a confidence interval using a series of keystrokes, I could focus on what a confidence interval means, how to explain it in plain language, and how to make decisions based on the output.

It also allowed me to stop teaching students how to use a calculator that was never really designed for statistics in the first place. The TI-83 and TI-84 are graphing calculators with a few statistical functions layered on top. Some of the features I needed had to come in the form of downloaded programs, which was a logistical challenge in any classroom medium. StatCrunch, by contrast, was built from the ground up for data analysis.

This experience even prompted me to rethink my approach in other courses, such as College Algebra. Once I saw how much more efficient and transparent things became using modern tools like StatCrunch, I started reevaluating my use of the TI calculators more broadly. That led me to explore Desmos and other platforms that provide powerful visualizations and eliminate the need to teach around the limitations of outdated hardware. What began as a change for one course evolved into a shift in my overall philosophy of technology in math instruction.

Far-reaching benefits

In hindsight, I regret not making this switch sooner. What started as a fix for one problem ended up solving many others. It improved the integrity of my exams, boosted student engagement, reduced confusion, and created more space in my course for meaningful learning.

There will always be a place for the TI calculator in some classrooms, especially where testing environments and course goals are different. But for online instruction, especially when paired with remote proctoring, I have no hesitation in saying that StatCrunch has become the right tool for the job.

And I am not going back.

This series of statistical examples is intended to inform students about the statistics (and how it relates to the psychology) casinos use on table games to make them a more informed consumer. This series is not intended to be a “how to beat the house” or any other sort of get rich quick scheme. If I had a way to beat the house, don’t you think I would be doing it and not giving up the secrets? Overall, it is good to think of casino games as forms of entertainment, and you are encouraged to treat them as such. If you have or know someone who has a gambling problem, please use resources, and reach out to a professional for help.

Often students do not have a concept for the Normal Distribution when it comes to the sampling chapter, and the Galton Board is used to give students the visual reference in the classroom for discrete random variables showing a normal distribution when enough observations are dropped through the board. Unless students are soon to be contestants on The Price Is Right and are faced with Plinko, or NBC’s game show The Wall, they are not likely to encounter the board in their life outside the class. A more accessible way for students to see the normal distribution and understand the importance of sample size is the Craps Table.

��The casino game of Craps is simplistic: the act of throwing two dice and summing up the showing faces is the experiment in the game of craps. While using the full casino game with payouts and their corresponding probabilities creates a valued learning activity, this activity focuses only on the act of rolling the dice. To emphasize the previous chapters (discrete random variables categorization and visualization)�� the image below shows the number of ways the dice total can occur: