In 2010, Professor Sharon Feaster began offering Connect Anatomy & Physiology to her students as an extra study tool. In 2011, when she required students to complete homework assignments within Connect, she witnessed dramatic improvement in student grades, pass rates and retention. During the Fall 2011 semester when Connect was required, 22% more students passed the course and 29% more students completed the course than during the previous semester. Read this CASE STUDY to find out why Professor Feaster credits Connect with having made a real difference for her students.

Professor Feaster says, “I observed that A students are going to make A’s regardless of what is asked of them. The Connect and LearnSmart assignments force all of the students to study in a variety of ways [...] which evidently improves their understanding.” The data backs this up, showing that Connect made a significant difference for students who might have otherwise withdrawn from or failed the course or who may not learned the material well enough to pass the course. As a result, Professor Feaster “absolutely” recommends Connect to other faculty.

The research shows that McGraw-Hill LearnSmart™ works. In a study involving almost 700 students from 6 institutions, students experienced higher success rates with LearnSmart.

Final analysis shows when LearnSmart is assigned more B students earn A’s and more C students get B’s.

The distribution shows the aggregate of letter grades assigned by instructors. A Chi Square test was performed to determine if final course grades were distributed differently across the two groups (control and experimental). The test indicated a significant difference, Χ2 (4) = 11.667, p = .020 (an alpha level of .05 was adopted for this statistical test).

Read more about the study results here!

Dr. Lynda Haas, Associate Director of Composition and Course Director at the University of California, needed a way to standardize the department’s grammar and language instruction. She chose Connect® Composition as a framework to help facilitate this initiative. Today, Dr. Haas uses Connect as the course shell she prepares for 100 instructors and teaching assistants across the campus. Read this CASE STUDY to learn how students have shown improvement on every rubric measure.

According to Dr. Haas, “The majority of instructors at UCI who use Connect Composition in their classes believe that it has improved their students’ writing.” The success that instructors and students have had with Connect has led to its implementation in fully online classes at UCI. The department has also created a new class, Hum29, with Connect at the center, serving as a two-hour online “helper” class for students in composition courses with extensive ESL issues. In the future, the department plans to require students in all Writing 39B sections – about 70 – to complete both the diagnostic and the final essay within Connect Composition. The rubric and related Connect reports will give Haas’s department empirical data on student progress in every class offered for the very first time.

Prior to implementing Connect® Music, Professor Carolyn Ponce had used reading assignments, interactive chapter activities, and CDs in her online course, but her students lacked a sense of total engagement with the material. She felt that by increasing student access to listening opportunities, she could better engage them in the course. Thanks to the streaming music available in Connect Music, her students now spend much more time on concept application and active listening. As a result, she has seen an increase in the number of students earning an A in the course. Read more about her success in this CASE STUDY.

Connect Music not only provided students with simplified access to the music, but also enabled Professor Ponce to monitor how her students interacted with it. She is very pleased with the results and says, “Thank you for Connect! It is a powerful tool and it does add great value to a course.”

Professor Villar-Smith sought an engaging way to teach the grammar component outside of class so that she would have more time in class to focus on the writing process. In Summer 2009, she selected two six-week classes to test the effectiveness of Connect® Writing, using it for online grammar drill and practice in one class and teaching the grammar component traditionally in the other class. The results were remarkable: final passing scores were 20% higher in the class that used Connect Writing, and this class had a 100% student retention rate. Read the CASE STUDY to learn more, and watch the Spotlight Video below to hear Professor Villar-Smith, her colleagues and her students talk about their experience.

“I expected higher passing rates on both the state exam and the departmental writing exam, and this is exactly what has occured,” she says. “Connect Writing makes the teaching of the process of writing less stressful. It has opened up more free time for me to dedicate to student writing.”