Excel Together New Mexico

"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!"