“Hi, I'm Brittany! I took a lot of special needs math classes growing up. And so I didn't finish high school – I was like: I can't do math so I won't be able to do anything. I did the whole stay-at-home-with-kids things for awhile, and only worked at restaurants…

Then the CSM course came along… I've always hated math, but I really enjoyed CSM! I don't know if it was all the concepts for problem solving that it gives you, or the fact that whenever I got so frustrated that I was going to shut my computer, it would take me to somewhere else for awhile. I managed to finish, and I was so excited!

I got my three credits for math, and I started college to be a substance abuse counselor. I had always wanted to help people, and the only thing that was holding me back in my mind was well, I can't do math. As if the people I was going to be helping were going to say ‘well, can you do math?’.

And so now I don't have to take any math for my associate’s. Now looking back, I felt like I wasn't deserving of a college degree, because I couldn't get through basic math. I had kinda given up, really. To me, CSM saved me!”  

Brittany was on the Dean's List at BridgeValley Community and Technical College !

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"Hello, my name is Janelle, I’m from West Virginia and I have my CSM Certificate!

With my previous education, the employment I was able to get offered little to no advancement. Typically, people these days want some piece of paper saying you went to college.

Now that I have my CSM Certificate, I’ll be receiving my associate's degree through Eastern in 2023. After this, I plan to pursue a bachelor’s degree where I’ll need to complete higher level college math… Having my CSM Certificate gives me the confidence that I’ll be able to complete that math.

I’d not done very well in math before, so I was nervous when I heard about CSM… CSM never made you feel uneducated, never made you feel… stupid.  It was so fun, and it made you think about math totally different. There are day to day activities that I do and I am able to right off the top of my head now.

I want to stress to all of the adults out there that no matter your age, no matter how well you performed in high school, or even if you didn’t graduate from high school, take the first step. Go beyond what you thought was possible, for yourself. Dream big and don’t be afraid to be awesome!"

Janelle graduated from Eastern WV Community and Technical College in spring, 2023

“Hi, my name is Jon Hof and I’m coming to you from Winsville, WV.

After I married, I took some colleges courses at a community college, that was enough to give me 14-15 credit hours. And I said let’s go after it!

After many years, I got to within one class of qualifying for my associates degree – math. I mean I was this close. But I had been away from math for 58 years.

After a few problem sets, CSM got so much easier, it was automatic. I had to think my way through different math and begin to go past the knowledge I learned a long, long time ago.

Having completed my AS degree, and also completing the CSM Course, I felt doubly strong and doubly satisfied. And since completing CSM, math is no longer frightening to me.

I’m retired now, but I’m at a point where I still want to work. I want exposure to other people, I want to feel a purpose. I don’t have a teaching degree, but I got a job working with special needs children. And I’m helping students in high school with their math quizzes, not the special needs but the high schoolers… You don’t know how much more comfortable I feel with the knowledge that I learned with CSM."

Jon received an associate degree from Eastern WV Community and Technical College in spring, 2022

"Since 2008 National Oilwell Varco or NOV has invested roughly $70 Million in internal training programs. We now recognize that we are pretty good at developing and delivering the technical side of things, however, we have found that upon completion of the training, some of our workforce continues to struggle with retaining their newly gained knowledge and how to best apply new concepts. The end result is technically competent employees that perform at an average level, or as [SeeMore Impact Labs] puts it, a C level.

Within our own internal courses or the training grants there has been very little focus on soft skills, in particular how to improve in areas of critical thinking and problem solving. These skills are essential elements to NOV as we aim to develop a workforce that is empowered, can solve problems effectively and efficiently, and possess the critical thinking skills that lead to innovation and higher performance levels.

To address these areas of need we turned to CSM. Feedback from our pilot tests has confirmed that CSM has the potential to help us achieve our workforce objectives by providing and excellent foundation for critical thinking and problem solving.

Our workforce ranges from middle school graduates with GED’s to advanced degree holders with various skill levels, so development of internal training programs has been challenging based on the individual ability to learn. CSM understands that individuals learn differently and provides the flexibility to use alternative training methods to achieve the goals.

Our pilot group has indicated that CSM teaches in a manner that is non-threatening and less frustrating with a strong focus on persistence, attention to detail and improved knowledge retention. In short, it teaches our workers how to learn.

Our hope is that the partnership with CSM will result in a more confident, self-reliant workforce that is more soft skill competent and has a changed mindset from “Getting the job done” to “Getting the job done more effectively and efficiently” and that NOV will ultimately benefit with improved quality and reduced cost in our products and services."

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"Actually I was surprised I thought I would do much better and much faster than that. It’s challenging, I’m definitely learning and I think the self-learning is a big part of it…and also getting really mad at yourself as you go through it because its attention-to-detail and persistence and all of those things. You have to have all of that in order to get through this, because you are on your own.

As you go through it, you’re like 'I know this' and you answer all of the questions. And then you get one wrong and you’re like 'WHAT!' and you get really upset and then you’re like 'But what did I do wrong?' and then you’re kind of like 'OH I see what I did wrong! Okay next time I’m going to be more careful.'

So what’s nice about it is it really does [make you think] 'How could I make such a stupid mistake?' and then you think 'Oh, I should have been more careful.'

It’s that process of self-thinking and then having to go back if you don’t know it. They don’t teach you up front. You go through it and if you get it wrong, then you learn. You only go to the lesson if you need it and a lot of times I never went to the lesson and just figured it out by myself.

It’s a process and that builds your self-esteem because math is not my favorite thing – it’s not! So as I continued to get better and better, I thought 'huh, I can do this!' My math self-esteem became much better. I think it goes back to you have to learn on your own, you have to push through the frustration and then build persistence and your self-esteem. It really did do that."

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"The industry welcomes people from every corner of our society, with diverse educational foundations. And many of the employees who join the industry are ill-equipped with some of the basic math, reading, and critical thinking skills it takes to achieve the next rung on the ladder. A lack of proficiency in these areas can go undetected during an employee's early tenure. And if detected too late, they may miss the opportunity to realize their full potential.

CSM provides a valuable tool for assessing and strengthening the proficiency of employees at all levels of the organization. As an employer, one can have absolute confidence that a team member who has successfully completed the CSM Course will have a solid foundation upon which to build their job-specific knowledge and skills. If allowed to permeate an organization, it has the potential to affect the team culture, and strengthen the foundation of the enterprise.

The team at [SeeMore Impact Labs] has put together a great program that will benefit not only a company, but society as a whole."

"I am the math and science facilitator at Montbello High School.  For the past 6 years, my experience has been with at risk youth. Montbello is an urban high school with an extremely challenging student population – 85% of students are free and reduced lunch, many students are minority, undocumented and/or otherwise at-risk, and about two-thirds of the students at an unsatisfactory level on the state proficiency test.  Currently the Montbello area has a 49% drop out rate.  For many of our students, we have had little success with any math intervention.

We introduced CSM for 11^th and 12^thgraders in a pilot this fall with an “average” selection of students, and remarkably, the majority of students made substantial progress on CSM – including many who started at very basic math and literacy levels.  The consistent feedback from the teachers has been that CSM makes the students work hard – it doesn’t let them off, and it doesn’t let them guess.  Yet instead of frustrating the students, they appear to enjoy working with it. 

The unanimous feelings of the math teachers involved in the program is that students are learning in ways they haven’t before.  With the results from the first semester, we have expanded the program during the second semester, and the student results seem to be holding. From what we see within the CSM teacher interface, about two-thirds of the students are making satisfactory to excellent progress, and the remaining third working hard to compete with their classmates on their progress.  CSM is extremely exciting to me in its potential role in building not only the math skills of students, but also their general interest in academic work, and their ability to learn.  I see broad use of CSM within this population.

CSM is very different from the other computer-based systems that I have seen – it is not narrowly competency-based, and it addresses the deficits that many struggling students have both in their feelings about learning as well as the learning strategies that they use.  I strongly believe that this sensible direction – giving our teachers more information about these aspects of students, and guiding their interventions, is an important tool for teachers.  This will also be of particular benefit for those teachers who need professional development with intervention or more generally in dealing with struggling students."

"Our original goal was to be able to utilize CSM to give our young people the necessary skills to be more successful whether they chose to start working, go to college or the military. Because we serve youth 16-24 that come to us with huge deficits in their knowledge base, we hope to be able to use this program to fill in the gaps in their ability to critically think and problem solve. We hoped that it would improve not only their math literacy but reasoning skills. 

CSM has exceeded our expectations.  An example of what this program is capable of doing is the story of one of our students, Jose A., who is 17 years old, has been in and out of juvenile hall, has attended multiple high schools and has only completed 40 out of 200 credits needed for graduation.  Jose came to us with limited academic abilities, but with an interest in learning. During his fourth or fifth day working with CSM, we were having technical problems with our WIFI, so he worked at my computer which allowed me the opportunity to observe his behavior. 

I watched as he read and re-read a question, made some calculations on his hands, selected the answer and then cautiously pressed “next” to see if he had made the correct choice.  He immediately received feedback from CSM that he had indeed answered the question correctly and he gave himself a fist pump and said quietly “Yes”.  His confidence has soared using CSM and to date he has completed more than 50% of the program content.  He is now helping other students when they get stuck on a question! 

How could you ask for a better outcome? So many programs out there promise improved learning outcomes and rarely deliver results. From our point of view as educators and administrators, the CSM program not only delivers excellent outcomes, it gives us the opportunity to have these ongoing small teachable moments with students to help strengthen their basis skills and reasoning abilities. The programs monitoring and feedback capabilities are quite stellar. We are extraordinarily happy with what we are experiencing and our students are improving their skills and feeling not only challenged but empowered in their learning.

We are grateful to have a program that actually delivers what it promises and then some.  Thank you for bringing this invaluable tool to our young people!"

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"I was introduced to CSM while several of our employees were doing their Adult Diploma program at Cuyahoga Community College. I was incredibly skeptical of the learning program, but when I saw what our employees were doing and witnessed their success in not only the mastery of the skills of CSM, but then saw their completion of their High School Diploma, after multiple failures of the GED, I was hooked! Seriously, not to be too dramatic, but our employees have changed since doing this program." 

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“Ok, so for those of you who need a math course, I can’t suggest CSM enough. As someone with ADHD who is AWFUL at math, this way of learning is far more effective than any traditional setting that I have experienced in my life. It’s fun, and I am learning a lot more than I ever have!” – BrighterFuture88, July 2019

“I'm in my mid-50s and have nearly 40 years experience in my field, yet I don't have a degree. Every time I have decided I'd like to go back to school, the math requirement has scared me off....I was really intimidated and deflated, but CSM's learning method made me feel... I think "safe." After the initial 2-hour trial, I was shaking because I was actually learning, and thinking, "OMG! I CAN DO THIS!!" This is not to say the course is easy. IT IS NOT. But once I realized I could get through it with a lot of hard work and determination, I figured maybe I CAN get a degree after all.  Thank you!” – monchevy, June 2020

“Maybe I'm strange, but I loved CSM! It's what got me started back into my degree journey, especially since I really didn't want to take a math course. If it wasn't for CSM, there's no way I would have endeavored to tackle a Statistics course so I could go for a BA in Psych and now I am even considering a more math emphasized degree! CSM gave me wings and a love of and appreciation for math!” –CarpeDiem8, July 2019