"I can say qualitatively, there's a huge confidence difference in terms of the way my students answer questions in class and even the depth at which they know the material"

Professor Minus maximised student learning outside of the classroom to improve his student's learning outcomes.

After an experience teaching high school students, Professor Minus was all too familiar with the reality that as a college professor, you're required to cover almost twice the material of a high school teacher, yet you're only able to meet with your students 2-3 times a week.

"For me, the issue is content. It's really hard in a college semester to get through the material. Back in the day, the understanding was that we [professors] are going to test on chapters 1 through 3 and the student is responsible for anything in the book. Now if you do that, and you can do that as an instructor, [but] you're going to find that you get the nastiest reviews on Rate My Professor.”
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“The students don't know what's going on. And a lot of them start to decide, ‘well, I'm going to use alternative methods to succeed. Maybe even unethical ones.’ “ said Minus.

Creating an environment of learning to support students to succeed in assessments.

Observing that his students responded positively to video content on Instagram and Youtube, Professor Minus realized he wanted to provide them with some sort of video-based resource that would support their academic learning.
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In the summer semester of 2020,  Professor Minus began using Clutch Prep's textbook-specific chapter videos to introduce and re-affirm the same content that was on his syllabus. In both cases, Professor Minus reported being able to provide student's with not only a better sense of what was going on in class, but was also able to make more effective use of his limited & highly valuable time with students.

In order to deepen his student's learning in a remote learning environment, he also desired a way to increase both the quality and frequency of touch-points in which his students could be provided valuable feedback prior to exams.

"Feedback before the test is important. The last thing you want to do is not get feedback before a test and they (students) don't get any feedback until after then. Maybe you could have put out that fire before if you had some sort of interactive homework."

Clutch Prep was able to help fill this critical gap by providing additional feedback loops for students pre-exam, with video based homework assessments. Professor Minus was able to assign his homework from a large set of graded practice problems with step-by-step video explanations for his students.

A classroom with higher engagement and higher grades.

So what were the results?

*With a background in research science, Professor Minus decided the best way to evaluate the impact of Clutch Prep on his student's learning was to run a split test in his Fall 2020 Chem 1053 sections. One section would continue to use normal resources, while the other section used Clutch Prep's video homework and lessons for the semester.

Qualitatively, he saw a remarkable difference in both the depth of understanding and grade of students in the Clutch Prep class.

"Anecdotally, if I wanted to say there was a Clutch advantage. The Clutch advantage might be around 5 percent points. Without doing a full study, I would say half a letter grade right off the bat. And it might even be bigger than that -you have to see maybe one day we'll get to a study, study. Until then, I can definitely say that there's a difference in performance and I would challenge any professor that if they actually tried it out, they would experience a difference."

While his primary objective was to evaluate a resource that could be helpful to the learning of his students, he also experienced several unexpected results. Including near-seamless integration with his lectures and empowering and supporting self-directed student learning, remarking"it puts the class into their hands. It puts their education back into their hands."

What advice would you share with other chemistry professors?

"Try it, just try it. I think that it's worth a try. I know it's easy to sit in convention, but these aren't conventional times. If you just decide even mid-semester you know what, I'm going to sign my students up and they're going to do the last 4 chapters through Clutch Prep, you'll see the difference. In this pandemic, stress happens and things happen, if you can make some lemonade out of it by trying something new, then go for it," says Minus.