blog posts and news stories

Empirical Education Partners with Carnegie Learning on New Student Performance Guarantee

Schools looking to improve student Algebra and Geometry achievement have signed up for a guarantee from Carnegie Learning® that states that students using the company’s Cognitive Tutor programs will pass their math courses. Empirical Education is tasked to monitor student performance in participating schools. Starting this school year, Carnegie Learning guarantees that students who take three complete and consecutive years of Carnegie Learning’s math courses will pass their math class in the third year. The guarantee applies to middle and high school students taking the Carnegie Learning Bridge to Algebra, Algebra, Algebra II, and Geometry courses.

In the coming weeks/months, Empirical will collect roster data, course grades, and assessment scores from schools as well as usage data from Carnegie Learning’s math teaching software. These data will be combined to generate biannual reports that will provide schools with evidence they can use to effectively improve implementation of the courses and raise student achievement.

Carnegie Learning’s guarantee is part of their School Improvement Grant support efforts. “Partnering with Empirical Education will allow us to get mid- and end-of-year research reports into the hands of our school partners,” says Steve Ritter, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Carnegie Learning. “It’s part of our continuous improvement cycle; we’re excited to see the progress districts committed to the turnaround and transformation process can make with these new, powerful tools.”

Report Released on the Effectiveness of Carnegie Learning’s Bridge to Algebra

Empirical Education released the results of a year-long randomized experiment on the comparative effectiveness of Carnegie Learning’s Bridge to Algebra program. This study, like that on Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor for Algebra (see news for May 24, 2007), was conducted in cooperation with the Maui School District in Hawai’i and funded through a grant to Empirical Education from the U.S. Department of Education. The experiment could not discern an overall difference between the program and control group measured by either NWEA’s test for general math or the test’s algebraic operations subscale. However, for the algebraic operations outcomes (but not for general math), we found that students scoring low before participating in Bridge to Algebra benefited significantly more from the program’s algebraic operations instruction than did students with high initial scores. The district was specifically interested in looking at how the different ethnic groups, particularly the Hawaiian/Part-Hawaiian and Filipino students, performed in the new program. Controlling for pretest, we did not find that the program had a different effect for different ethnicities. The district was also interested in learning whether the program was differentially effective for students taught by certified teachers versus those with non–certified teachers. For the overall score (but not the algebraic operations sub-strand), we found that the program gave the non–certified teachers an advantage. Finally, despite some implementation challenges, teachers reported a generally positive attitude toward the new program.