Certified Tutors From Cleveland State Community College

Today the student and I briefly talked about what we had gone over before. Her ability to identify which statistical tests to use has increased greatly, but the real change is in her confidence. She is very confident in knowing what to do when, which is great. I am not worried about her digesting specific methods. We went over t- vs z- distributions and the central limit theorem to help her with specifics that I believe will come up on her exam. Our main focus was research design. We discussed research design and errors by going through one of the old tests from her University together. After she told me how she would approach each question, I then told her my approach, and we discussed. This is helping her fill in the blanks, especially when it comes with when to use specific terms such as type I error and maturation effects. The student's homework for today was to work through 1-2 more of her old tests and generate any questions that she still has. We will meet for one last pre-exam session tomorrow at 4:00pm CST to go over any last minute questions.

We worked primarily on finding the area of a triangle and studying for the student's science test. She did well with the triangles. She's starting to show an understanding of area, which will need to be reviewed, and how to find the area of a triangle. She did struggle a bit with finding the rectangle that the triangle needed to fit into to find the width and length, but by the end, she was doing this with accuracy. In science, she was strong on most concepts, but could use review of vocabulary and how the phases of the moon work.

I worked with Student 1 on solving inequalities using multiplication and division. He showed a basic understanding. He grew confused when multiplying and dividing negative numbers since the inequality sign has to switch, but with repetition, he was able to grasp the concept and graph the solved inequality better. Student 2 worked on basic terms within algebra, like variables and constants. We worked towards being able to solve for variables within algebraic equations.

Today, we covered the ellipses and hyperbola. We were soon able to power through the sections and get the student to a place where she could do them.

We worked on the online math problem engine, which got increasingly difficult the more questions the student solved correctly. There were several problems about the number of cubes that would fit into boxes, or the surface area of small cubes cut from a large cube. There were several problems that required either use of the quadratic formula or educated guessing plus a lot of pencil-and-paper calculation. There were problems about the number of possible arrangements of digits in a telephone number, about the area of an irregular pentagon which could be broken into triangles and rectangles, about the slope and intercepts of a line, about averages and modes and medians, and about sequences that were neither arithmetic nor geometric. For a word problem involving two variables, I showed him how to write a pair of equations and solve them using substitution. Overall, it was a very productive session, and he was alert, curious, flexible, and creative - as always.

The student and I met this afternoon to look over a practice DBQ she had in class and to begin discussing and reviewing the Reconstruction and Gilded Age eras in US history. She continues to do well in her class, maintaining a 90 as the term comes to a close.