Mastery made simple.

The first few weeks of a term set the tone for everything that follows. It’s the window where students either build momentum toward mastery or quietly start to fall behind. The good news? A few deliberate steps at the start can make a measurable difference. The tips below come from the Hawkes Customer Success team and from Hawkes Faculty Consultants who teach with the platform every day, including Dr. Hillary VanSpronsen of Maine Maritime Academy, who has used Hawkes in Precalculus and Calculus for nearly 10 years, and Professor Brandon Ford of Navarro College, a long-time advocate of mastery-based learning. 1. Make the Student Training Tutorials & Quizzes Your First Assignment Before students dive into their first lesson, give them a quick tour. Two short Assignable Tutorials & Quizzes cover everything they need to get started: Tutorial 1: Course navigation and key features Tutorial 2: Practice WebTests, including how to prepare for their first assessment and get more out of Hawkes Each tutorial includes quiz questions, so students engage with the content instead of just clicking through it. By making these your first assignments, you can spend less class time explaining how the platform works, and experience fewer roadblocks (and support tickets) once graded work begins. Ready to add them? Contact your Customer Success Specialist or email instructorsupport@hawkeslearning.com to add the Assignable Student Tutorials & Quizzes directly to your course. 2. Explain Learn, Practice, Certify on Day One Mastery-based learning may be new to your students, and explaining how the mastery approach works can help them understand how they’ll be graded going into the semester. Take a few minutes on the first day of class to set expectations before the first assignment is due. Hawkes is built around a three-step path to mastery: Learn → Practice → Certify. Students who skip ahead to Certify without working through the instruction first tend to struggle more and need more attempts. Take five minutes to walk through each stage. Stage What Students Do Learn Work through multimedia lesson content: concept builders, animations, instructional videos, and interactive skill checks. Practice Solve algorithmically generated problems with step-by-step tutorials and error-specific feedback. AI Tutor is available in Practice, and students may choose to use it. Every attempt is different, so more practice builds skill, not memorization. Certify Demonstrate mastery without tutoring aids. Students can miss a few questions but must answer enough correctly to reach the mastery level. If they miss too many, they return to Practice to review, then retake Certify with new questions, penalty free, before the due date.

We are so excited to introduce our Fall 2026 Student Ambassadors! Each semester, Hawkes recruits student interns from across the United States to serve as Hawkes Student Ambassadors, helping new users navigate and succeed with our online courseware platform. Through one-on-one support, Student Ambassadors answer questions, demonstrate key platform features, and provide guidance on tools that can strengthen learning outcomes. Having completed at least one Hawkes course themselves, these students offer authentic, experience-based support and serve as trusted resources for their peers as they begin their Hawkes journey.

An independent, peer-reviewed study found that students using Hawkes Learning outperformed students using traditional paper-and-pencil homework — on quizzes, on final exams, and overall satisfaction. This study was conducted by James Quinlan, a mathematician at the University of Southern Maine. It was published in the Ohio Math Journal and was not funded, commissioned, or sponsored by Hawkes Learning in any way. The Question Every Math Instructor Has Asked Does online homework actually work, or does it just make grading easier? It is a fair question. Switching students from paper-and-pencil homework to an online platform is a real change, and instructors deserve more than a promise that it will improve student outcomes. They deserve evidence. James Quinlan designed a controlled study in a first-semester calculus course, comparing students using traditional homework to students using Hawkes Learning with no funding from Hawkes. Just a researcher who wanted an honest answer. This blog shines a light on what he found.