What is the name of your organization?
SeeMore Impact Labs
What is the name of your solution?
Excel Together with CSM
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Uplifting individuals & transforming communities via educational technology that develops personal agency and the skill of lifelong learning
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Boulder, CO, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
UNESCO reports that about 85% of secondary students in low income and 70% in low-middle incomes countries have not achieved minimum proficiency levels in math and literacy. Even in high-income countries, large majorities of individuals in disadvantaged communities show deeply remedial skills. This comprises approximately 2.5 billion 16–65-year-olds in low/low-middle income countries, and approximately 100 million in the United States. Addressing these deficiencies in human capacity is a prerequisite for not only improving individual flourishing, but also the economic growth and thriving of communities small and large.
In the past, educational technology was considered the primary path to scaling education to disadvantaged communities, but even where the issues of poor technological infrastructure have been significantly solved, the outcomes of educational technology worldwide have largely been disappointing, even in high-income countries. In the United States, for example, technology tends to increase the skills gap by accelerating the progress of advanced students, while decelerating the progress of struggling students.
Whether approaches are technologically or otherwise based, there is currently no consensus understanding either on why previous attempts at educational equity have been largely unsuccessful, or on a path forward towards a solution with community or global scale.
What is your solution?
Our online, self-paced Core Strategies for Mathematics (CSM) course uses a new approach to adaptive learning technology that personalizes instruction simultaneously in academic and how-you-learn, -act and -feel domains. It is based on the notion that math deficits are largely reflections of students’ poor learning effectiveness and low academic self-efficacy. By focusing CSM on building “High Performance” competencies like active independent learning, attention to detail, persistence, and a drive to excel, math skills acquisition is significantly accelerated. With embedded deep remediation to 4th grade skills, CSM has shown extraordinary ability to allow even opportunity youth and low-literacy mid-career adults to earn college math credit. Furthermore, CSM’s ability to improve durable/transferable skills allows it to serve as both an educational and workforce upskilling program.
Scaling CSM across communities is Excel Together’s focus. By embedding college math credit, workforce development incentives, and hiring preferences into the CSM Certificate, this gives education/training programs an incentive to offer the CSM course, and for individuals to take CSM. In the US, CSM is offered in schools, adult education, workforce development and employee upskilling programs, starting now to operate in statewide or regional programs.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
With a curriculum that integrates college-level quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and problem-solving with High Performance competencies, the CSM course serves an extraordinary range of users: struggling high school students, opportunity youth, older low-literacy adults, technical apprentices, corporate tuition assistance participants, corporate managers with college degrees, college students in Rwanda – and soon non-college postsecondary students in Ghana. CSM’s math skills were selected for their broad usefulness in life and work, applicable across all sectors and jobs in both low- and high-income countries.
Educational systems often inadvertently undermine the development of lifelong learning by encouraging passive learning, adhering to low standards of competence, bringing about learned helplessness, and depleting self-efficacy. While CSM’s academic skill-building is important, its greatest impact lies in cultivating the foundations for lifelong learning and personal agency—teaching individuals how to learn and instilling the confidence (self-efficacy) to do so. These attributes foster resilience in the face of challenges and empower learners to seize new opportunities as they arise. CSM is focused on the highest outcome of education: not what you know, but how well you learn.