By David Hart,
COO, Carnegie Learning, Inc.

Carnegie Learning just announced Math Prep, a new product family designed to help students pass high-stakes high school exit exams.

The number of high-stakes tests being administered in our schools is skyrocketing across the country.  A little over a year ago, one of our field consultants in Texas asked for a TAKS prep course in math.  Our other salespeople concurred there was demand for effective test preparation courses but the range of existing solutions very broad and no single player was dominating the field.  We learned most schools used "homegrown" methods to teach remedial math, and most struggled to combine assessment and remediation into a single integrated program.

One of the toughest things about the educational publishing business is the proliferation of local educational standards, all subtly different the one from the other.  In order to simplify my own life I would welcome national standards in testing and grade progress.  Establishing and maintaining correlations between your products and your customers' standards is a time consuming grind.  It also divides the market into small pieces and creates confusion in product naming and management.

But, we need to focus on local standards to meet our customers needs.  So, we have launched our Math Prep products as state editions, with CA, FL, TX, WA, and a national edition.  The courses are designed to prepare students for high-stakes exit exams, providing up to 130 hours of instruction in subject areas covered on the exam.  As with all Cognitive Tutor courses, Math Prep adopts its instruction to each student's needs, closely watching the student's learning and providing more instruction as needed. 

More states will be coming from Carnegie Learning this year.  Additionally, Math Prep is our first product to integrate a pre-test with the instruction, which better focuses remediation on areas where the student shows weakness.  The pre-test data lets us better define the cognitive model of the student's skills at a very granular level.  This is an exciting new development and we will be looking at ways to integrate this feature across other products.

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