Instructor and Faculty Partner Wendiann Sethi partnered with the WebAssign team to develop new Precalculus and Calculus review material for Advanced Statistics. The new material will address readiness gaps in statistics students and provide beneficial student support for key topics.
Keep reading to hear about Wendiann’s experience throughout this partnership and how these new problems will benefit students.
Q: Why is Review Important for Advanced Statistics?
A: Many times, while teaching students Statistics for Science, I’ve found that students have forgotten some of the Algebraic and Calculus skills needed to solve the problems. I must admit that I would rather focus our class time to cover the statistical material rather than review material that “they should already know.” When I was asked by Cengage to help create a solution, I enthusiastically jumped at the opportunity.
Q: How Did You Identify Key Topics for Review?
A: We reviewed all of the problems in Devore, Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences, 9th edition and Wackerly/Mendenhall/Scheaffer, Mathematical Statistics with Applications, 7th edition looking for the key Algebraic and Calculus topics that students would need to solve the problems that they don’t always remember. Some of the review topics included summation notation, solving absolute value inequalities, and integrating and differentiating of natural exponential functions.
Q: How Will the Results of this Project Benefit Future WebAssign Instructors & Students?
A: Using WebAssign for homework, instructors will be able to select the review topic exercises while selecting the problems for assignments using the Question Browser. Each chapter will have a section in the Question Browser named “Chapter X: Precalculus and Calculus Review”. If only Precalculus or Calculus is covered, that will be reflected in the name.
The exercises include examples, explanations, and videos to help students refresh their skills before or while they work on homework. This solution will give us the opportunity for students to review the skills they may have forgotten. As a result, this will give us more class time to focus on the new material.
Overall, I think it’s a win-win! I am very excited about incorporating these exercises into my homework assignments with my WebAssign class this upcoming spring semester.
About the Author
Wendiann Sethi is a Senior Faculty Associate and Director of Developmental Mathematics at Seton Hall University. To learn more about Wendiann, visit her Faculty Partner profile.
