Math Lit's approach to homework: MML and more

Our goal with the Math Lit book and course is to get students to be competent problem solvers who are college ready. To get there, we wrote and sequenced problems and activities designed with that end goal in mind. But to solidify concepts, students need to practice. Heather and I had used MyMathLab for years and loved it, but knew it was best suited to skill type exercises. We wanted students to do more than that in the Math Lit course, so we created the conceptual homework in the book. It provides students with much more involved problems, not exercises. Those problems require a student to apply what they've learned in the section. But they can't do that if they don't have the base level skills. That's where MyMathLab comes in.

The two types of homework work together and were designed as such. The MyMathLab homework wasn't an afterthought or haphazardly chosen. Like the text, much thought and care went into its development so that the goals of the course could be met. It's certainly a different approach to homework but the main thing is it works. Students develop skill understanding and then extend that understanding by being challenged with more involved problems. Unlike most commercial math literacy texts, the approach we use is effective. We have seen students year after year progress in their understanding and succeed in the subsequent college level courses.

Here are some examples:

For students to be able to solve a problem like this...

...they must have skills in exponents rules.

For students to be able to solve a problem like this...

...they must have skills in the distance formula and Pythagorean theorem.

For students to be able to solve a problem like this...

...they must have skills in writing equations of lines.