This webpage provides information on a self-paced, online course called Core Strategies for Mathematics (CSM) that uses path-breaking educational technology to rapidly develop both advanced practical math skills and general academic and work skills for success in school, college, work and life. We are offering free use to YALI alumni for pilot in their education and workforce programs.
CSM is for everyone:
CSM is used in the United States in school, college, workforce, and adult education programs, and even earns college math credit at a number of American colleges.
This webpage describes the CSM for YALI program from SeeMore Impact Labs, a US non-profit. We have been testing CSM in Rwanda and Ghana, and want to expand the tests across Africa. For this, we are offering CSM for the next 12 months to pilots at no cost, and we will make sure that CSM will always be affordable to African students. This offer comes with free CSM coach training (a 4-6 hour self-paced course), and unlimited support for coaches.
Please read below for additional information on CSM, ways in which it could be implemented, and how to register for the program.
CSM builds and certifies the High Performance skills that contribute to success in school, college, work and life:
CSM used the world's first adaptive learning technology that simultaneously personalizes instruction in academic and how-you-learn, -act and -feel domains. In a US national evaluation by Stanford Research Institute against the gold-standard courses by top international publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill, CSM had the largest math gains, and the highest student engagement.
Here are a few novel methods that CSM uses to build these High Performance competencies:
CSM's High Performance skills -- strong math, ability to learn independently, persistence, and attention to detail -- will help a student be successful in college. And by boosting self-efficacy, it increases their chances of going into either a technical/vocational or a degree college, as well as their aspirations for a more challenging or technical major.
These same skills are equally of use in the workplace, leading to an ever-growing career.
Potential applications might include as a math class, as a college prep class, as a vocational preparation class, as a summer or after-school class, or an adult education class for adults thinking of postsecondary education.
Success in the workplace depends less on what an employee knows, and more on how well they learn and whether they have a mindset of excellence -- CSM is uniquely able to build and assess these High Performance skills. With these skills, employees will naturally be growing and adapting as new technology and processes are adopted.
In addition, CSM has more targeted application for specific employees on a promotion path (they will need more math and literacy, and have much to learn), or who are starting advanced training (to ensure that they will be effective, successful learners).
Young adults who did not complete secondary school often are not effective learners, and they suffer from low self-efficacy (they have already failed at education, or were left behind). CSM addresses both of these problems. Furthermore, CSM seamlessly embeds deep remediation to elementary grade skills to help these young adults catch up.
Furthermore, the back of the CSM Certificate describes the High Performance that the student has mastered: this is a student who, on their own, learned math that gains college credit in the US, and they did it consistently getting 100% correct. This is someone all employers would want to give a chance.
Research has shown that one of the most important issues in elementary grade math education is that many elementary grade teachers lack math self-efficacy. Not only are their math skills poor, but the teachers lack confidence in their own math, and this is often transmitted to their students. CSM math strongly emphasizes mental math and estimation that teachers can use everyday in their work, further buttressing their math self-efficacy.
CSM operates on smartphones (iPhone and Android), tablets, and laptops, and can operate on 3G and higher network speeds.
CSM can be implemented in a variety of formats, including:
As a self-paced course, the time to complete CSM varies enormously according to whether the student has remedial math or literacy needs, if the student has English langauge issues, or if the student has learning challenges. We also find that students who have recently been in a school or college setting complete CSM faster than, for example, older adults who have not been in a classroom recently.
That being said, most students complete CSM in 25-80 hours. Students with some of the issues listed above may take even 120 or more hours, but CSM is designed for almost everyone to succeed given time and good coaching.
The calendar time for taking the course is usually determined by the needs of the program. An CSM intensive course might be 4 weeks long, with students working up to half-time on CSM. Alternatively, in a school environment where CSM is used 2-3 hours per week as part of a class or as an afterschool program, completion might take most of a school year. We have found in workforce and adult education programs that giving the students 8-12 weeks is often successful.
For students who completing CSM very quickly in a classroom setting, CSM comes with a follow-on course called Challenge Problems that has problem-solving and critical thinking lessons to the college level. This course comes free with CSM.
Students should have a coach, and the coach should have taken the 4-6 hour self-paced, online CSM Coaching Course -- this coaching course is free.
The coach does NOT need to be qualified to teach college-level math, and they don't even need to be a math instructor at all! Remember, it's the students job to learn the CSM math skills on their own, and the coach's responsibility to help them learn how to do this. The CSM Coaching Course can be taken by any adult.
Coaches are given access to the free Toolkit that gives insights not only on student math development, but also their learning to learn, persistence, ability to learn by reading, and other indicators not usually given in teacher interfaces. Use of the Toolkit is free for CSM coaches.
Please fill in the form below, and we will:
CSM currently is used almost exclusively in the United States -- because of this, it includes both metric and English units, and is focused on dollars. Also, most problems are given in workforce contexts that may not be familiar to people in Africa.
However, we are working on two African programs:
We saw that students at Kepler and the bootcamp very much liked CSM and its US focus -- they found this aspect of CSM interesting and exotic, and it did not interfere with their learning.
In the future, if there is significant interest, we hope to develop an African version of CSM.
The following is a video that can be shown to students before they start CSM, and gives you an idea of how students may think about CSM.
After you fill in this form, we'll get back to you usually within 1-3 business days with information about upcoming CSM for YALI webinars. If you don't hear from us in that time, please email us at contact@smilabs.org.
If you'd like to try out CSM beforehand, click the checkbox below.
