Participate as a Community Organization

Preparing people for education, work and life

Whether you're an adult or family education organization, a youth program, a faith-based organization, a drug rehabilitation program, a program for formerly incarcerated people, or another type of community organization, Excel Together West Virginia can help your organization and the people that you serve.

Our CSM Course is a short-term, humane, practical, supportive course that leads to the CSM Certificate, which earns college math credit, certifies employability skills, and is recognized by employers. CSM includes deep remediation, and even people who have struggled academically all their lives are able to complete the course.

CSM has outstanding implementation characteristics -- it's free for adults in West Virginia in partnership with adult education, and works on cellphones and tablets in low bandwidth conditions. All participants will benefit from a coach, and you can either use a free coach from West Virginia Adult Education, or Excel Together West Virginia will provide free professional development for your coaches, who do not need to be professional instructors.

CSM builds High Performance skills

Excel Together West Virginia brings the state together around an online, self-paced training program called the CSM Course that teaches High Performance skills that form the basis for success in school, college, work, and life:

college-level quantitative reasoning and professional literacy
problem-solving mindsets and strategies
learning agility
intention to excel, supported by attention to detail and persistence
and, most importantly, self-efficacy -- a person's belief in their ability to succeed at whatever they put their mind to.

Self-efficacy enjoys a consensus in educational psychology and organizational development as the most important factor in performance in both work and academic contexts -- knowing you can succeed leads to persistence, and persistence to learning and performance.

CSM is different

Inside CSM is a next-generation personalized learning engine that focuses on a person's learning strategies and mindsets, their behaviors, and how they feel about themselves. As these personal factors develop, participants build the ability to learn the math, literacy and problem solving on their own.

Some aspects of CSM give a sense of its difference from conventional courses:

CSM builds attention to detail by requiring 100% as the only passing score on mainly fill-in-the-blank questions -- this also develops a belief in participants that they are capable of A-level work.
CSM develops persistence by monitoring student frustration levels and collaborating with coaches to transform it into persistence.
CSM improves learning strategies and mindsets by observing participant learning to devise personalized interventions.
CSM enhances students' numerical intuitions and way of interacting with the world by focusing on mental math and estimation skills that the large majority of 4-year college graduates lack.
CSM builds robust problem solving with problems involving complex multi-step problems, often with information that is incomplete or hidden in memos written at the college level.

The CSM Certificate has concrete benefits for college and career building

College Credit

The CSM Certificate earns college math credit at partner colleges and many colleges across the country, so students can enter college with their math requirement in the rearview mirror. College math is the major academic cause for stopping-out in college, and one of the major concerns for people considering college, so earning a CSM Certificate improves both college access and completion.

Community analog to dual / concurrent enrollment

Dual and concurrent enrollment programs (earning college credit while in high school) are one of the most successful strategies for college access, but their cost and the logistics of hiring college-level instructors make them inaccessible to community programs, and most program require students to have placed into college programs. None of these issues applies to CSM.

CSM opens the opportunity for community programs to provide this critical college credit inexpensively and with our own instructors.

Career Readiness

Excel Together West Virginia has partnered with Workforce West Virginia, the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, and other business and industry associations to gain employer recognition of the CSM Certificate for use in hiring. Unlike Industry-Recognized Credentials, which by definition are for a limited number of positions in a single sector, the CSM Certificate will gain preferences for many jobs across a wide range of industries -- the High Performance skills are "transferable" employability skills.

The skills certified by the CSM Certificate are the ones that West Virginia employers are most excited about - the most important skills (and the ones hardest to assess in hiring) are learning agility, attention to detail, and problem solving, which all rank higher than job-specific skills and algebra (survey of West Virginia Manufacturers Association, 2023).

CSM improves math and literacy

CSM's focus on High Performance competencies including independent learning, persistence, attention to detail, and self-efficacy does NOT mean that it stints on academic learning.

A national study of educational technology with adult learners (and mainly opportunity youth) found that CSM had the largest math and literacy gains compared to gold-standard programs like ALEKS from McGraw-Hill and MyFoundationsLab from Pearson,

Most educational technology increases the skills gap, because it allows advanced students to accelerate while struggling students fall further behind (see, for example, the Pearson results). With CSM, the opportunity youth did far better than classroom instruction. Furthermore, the effect size in math was 0.5, which translates to roughly 2 grade levels of improvement over classroom instruction!

CSM applications

People in all types of programs need employability skills and college credit, and because of its deep remediation capabilities, and next-generation personalized learning technology, CSM can be used in many different types of programs:

as HiSET preparation
as transition to college for adult education or family literacy programs
as a high school after school or summer youth program, as a college and career readiness program
as a transition program for people coming out of incarceration
as a general workforce readiness program
as preparation for a workforce internship program
as the skills curriculum of a drug rehabilitation program
and more!

We're always happy to brainstorm together on the best ways to integrate CSM into your programming

A streamlined pathway to college

Few make it thorugh the conventional path

The road to a college degree is daunting for many West Virginians, and one of the scariest pieces is the general education college math requirement. Looking at the diagram, to fulfill the requirement, a high school dropout with 4th to 6th grade math skills would need to:

take a HiSET (high school equivalency) course, and then take the HiSET test -- most will fail the first time and have to take the course multiple times,

then take the ACCUPLACER or ACT college placement test -- most will place into developmental education,
then take multiple semesters of developmental education,
then take the required college math course - about half would fail, and need to retake the course

Only after all of this would they be ready to take the healthcare or IT courses that they came to college for! Just a few percent of students will ever complete these hurdles.

‍Note that nearly half of high school graduates have only 4th to 6th grade math skills, who then have to face all of these hurdles except for the HISET test.

CSM's streamlined path eliminates these hurdles

‍With Excel Together West Virginia, anyone can fulfill their college math requirement at many colleges simply by taking CSM! All colleges in the West Virginia Community and Technical College System accept the CSM Certificate as math credit that satisfies the general education math requirement for an associate degree. CSM is designed with built-in deep remediation and is extraordinarily supportive. This transforms college access and completion for both students and adults across the state.

Implementation

Time and technology

Most students take 25-70 hours to complete CSM, though some may take more (e.g. if they start with 4th to 5th grade math, are English language learners, or have modest learning disabilities). Depending on your program, most of student time on CSM can be at home or in an in-person class, and hybrid situations are very effective.

CSM can be taken on any internet-connected device, including smartphones, with modest bandwidth and data plans.

Cost

CSM costs $54 per user, but for adults in West Virginia is free through the Office of Adult Education in the WV Department of Education and through Workforce West Virginia. Look on the How to Take CSM page for information on contacting WV adult education. Note that local adult education sites may not be fully aware of the options for CSM, and if you are having troubles there, call the statewide Adult Education hotline at 800-642-2670.

Coaching

Coaches help students complete CSM more quickly and happily. If your program clients are adults, coaches are available at no charge through the Office of Adult Education. However, if your clients are still in high school or you would rather use your own coaches, Excel Together West Virginia will arrange for free training of coaches through an online, self-paced course that takes 4-6 hours, and will provide coaches with both support and online tools, also at no charge.

CSM coaches do NOT need to be professional instructors (or have any math instructional background). Coaches are mentors, problem-solvers, and cheerleaders, while students independently learn the math and literacy skills. The best coaches are empathetic and positive people -- many of the volunteers in community organizations can train to become CSM coaches.

Excel Together West Virginia is your partner

We provide extensive free assistance:

Planning tools for a well-structured, intentional implementation with a high fidelity of implementation
Professional development for your teachers, as well as free next-generation coaching tools and support. For more information of CSM Coaching, click here.
Communication resources for local employers about the value of CSM, and coordination in organizing internships and other benefits for your students

Career Strategies

The path-breaking Career Strategies course is included with CSM, if you'd like. Instead of focusing just on career choice, the Career Strategies builds an "internal career coach", available throughout a person's life, by teaching career decision-making as a skill.

For more information, click here.

Student at BridgeValley Community and Technical College

CSM was key in changing her life trajectory...

"...so now I don't have to take any math for my associate’s. Now looking back, I felt like I wasn't deserving of a college degree, because I couldn't get through basic math. I had kinda given up, really. To me, CSM saved me!”

Click here to read all of Brittany's story...

Past student at Eastern WV Community and Technical College

"And since completing CSM, math is no longer frightening to me... You don’t know how much more comfortable I feel with the knowledge that I learned with CSM."

Click here to learn more about Jon's story...

Coordinators at a YouthBuild charter high school

"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."

Click here to learn more about Kim and Sara's experience with CSM

"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!"