From 2012 to 2015, Professor Hector Enríquez at the University of Texas El Paso utilized MyLab Spanish in his five Elementary Spanish, Intermediate Spanish, and Spanish for Spanish Speakers courses. He partnered with Pearson to investigate how MyLab Spanish supports his students’ success. Through this research they found that:
- Students who scored an average of 80 percent or higher on MyLab Spanish homework had higher composition, exam, final exam, and final course scores than students who scored lower than 80 percent on MyLab Spanish homework.
- The correlation between student performance on MyLab Spanish homework assignments and final course scores was strong.
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Goals for courses utilizing MyLab Spanish
As coordinator of the lower division Spanish courses, Enríquez is challenged to meet many goals including:
- Meet the learning needs of both non-native and heritage speakers while delivering a uniform learning experience that can be personalized
- Offer students sophisticated learning tools at a reasonable cost
- Improve students’ overall performance, raising both pass rates and course completion rates
With these goals in mind, Enríquez adopted MySpanishLab for the introductory and intermediate Spanish sequences and has been utilizing it for over a decade.
How was MyLab Spanish used in the course?
The five Elementary Spanish, Intermediate Spanish, and Spanish for Spanish Speakers courses are face to face, hybrid/intensive, and online. Content, homework, and assessments are pre-assigned with due dates through the MyLab Spanish master course shell. Pearson exams are used, and questions on MyLab Spanish homework are similar to the questions that will appear on exams.
Per textbook chapter, all machine-graded exercises are assigned in MyLab Spanish over the course of (approximately) two weeks. This includes some tutorials and one chapter practice exam. Students have unlimited attempts on homework. In Elementary and Intermediate Spanish MyLab Spanish accounts for 15% of the course grade, while it accounts for 20% of the course grade in Spanish for Spanish Speakers.
Were students successful over the semester?
Examination of student results data across all five courses shows a strong correlation between MyLab Spanish scores and final course scores in the face-to-face* course format.
Students who scored 80 percent or higher on MyLab Spanish homework had higher average scores on compositions, exams, final exams, and final course scores than students who scored less than 80 percent on MyLab Spanish,
How MyLab Spanish supports students
At the end of the day, Enríquez’s goal is to help students become proficient in the language. He maintains:
- “MyLab Spanish has worked well for our students. When our students use MyLab Spanish, they become responsible for their own learning, and they succeed.”
- “MyLab Spanish meets the needs of heritage speakers with a range of exercises that target vocabulary and writing skills. With such a deep resource of activities and multimedia resources in MyLab Spanish, I can easily customize our course to address the unique strengths and weaknesses that heritage speakers bring to the course.”
Conclusion
In addition to helping students become proficient in Spanish, MyLab Spanish also had a positive impact on teaching. Enríquez notes how it saves grading time, it allows instructors to better use in-class time, and it gives instructors the opportunity to see where students’ strengths and weaknesses lie in terms of understanding the content.
Read the full findings here
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