Individuals with these skills strive every day to do things right, push through problems and bounce back from failures. High Performance & Lifelong Learning skills lead to success in school, college, work and life.
These universally valuable skills and traits are critical for individual success, but conventional learning often overlooks or inadvertently undermines them.
The CSM Course is a self-paced online course that takes most people 15-80 hours to complete, and builds the skills of High Performance & Lifelong Learning.
The CSM Course has the widest range of use of any single course. The same CSM Course is used by:
The reason that CSM can serve such a diverse group of people is that while different people need different academic and job-specific skills, CSM's High Performance & Lifelong Learning skills are of universal value.
"CSM definitely helped with confidence in learning and not being afraid to learn something new/something you could never figure out. I've never been more motivated to learn."
"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 learned that] I can overcome fear and anxiety, that I'm not a quitter when the going gets tough, that the skills presented and on which we are challenged involve both soft and concrete skills. I learned about math, but I also learned about my own personality. I learned about logic, but I also learned about my own patience (or lack of at times) ... Any time I concluded I was 'smarter' than the problem in front of me, I found that I wasn't. It's not about smarts - it's about utilizing our skills and trusting that we can slug our way through a tough spot."
CSM is unique not only in how it teaches, but what it teaches. The math, literacy and problem-solving that CSM teaches are chosen for their general usefulness in education, work and life.
The math skills covered in the CSM Course are equivalent to a 3 semester hour college course in quantitative reasoning, and many colleges accept CSM for math or elective credit ,often satisfying the general education math requirements for an associate or bachelor's degree.
In addition to teaching how to read specific values from graphs, CSM takes a broader view of graphical literacy, including using graphs to answer qualitative questions and look for trends.
To build High Performance & Lifelong Learning skills, we needed to create new technology that also addresses how a student learns, feels and acts, how they deal with frustrations, how to improve their focus, and how to encourage them to strive for excellence.
CSM guides students on a personalized path through math and literacy skills using the Goldilocks principle - they always work on skills that are not too hard or easy for them at the moment but are "just right", where they have to work hard, persevere through frustration, and can be rewarded with success. CSM identifies specific student thinking errors for efficient, effective learning.
Most educational technology is "competency-based", correlating to a passing score of 50-70% right on a multiple-choice test. The only passing score on CSM is 100% correct with mainly fill-in-the-blank problems. This helps students learn the mindsets required, that they are capable of excelling, and how good the joy of mastery feels.
CSM measures frustration by analyzing behavioral data, and guides students through converting their frustration into persistence using behavioral interventions and by informing their coach.
The "secret sauce" of success is self-efficacy - the deeply held belief that you can succeed, which is earned by students seeing themselves be successful in challenging learning situations. This is reinforced by informing students of the percentage (often large) of college graduates and all adults who couldn't do the skills they just completed.
The following documents are meant for instructors and education administrators to learn more technical details about CSM.
A general guide for understanding the CSM Course curriculum and pedagogy, and includes example problems for every "Core Skill" in CSM. This is NOT meant, however, for use in evaluating the CSM Course for prior-learning credit (PLC) -- for that, use the CSM Curriculum Guide - Quantitative Reasoning.
This is a short white paper describing CSM's best-in-class personalized learning.
equitable access
higher graduation rates
address math issues
community engagement
stop-out recovery
postsecondary access
apprenticeship
high school equivalency
career development
employer partnerships
performance upskilling
broaden, diversify pipeline
access to tuition assistance
higher engagement
culture transformation
community uplift
postsecondary access
employer engagement
equity
economic development
