By Virginia Lascara
virginia.lascara@insidebiz.com
Do you remember the commutative property of multiplication? Or how to graph a linear equation? These are both simple mathematical skills taught in basic pre-algebra and algebra classes. A majority of middle school-age students could ace these questions on a math test.
But for students entering college, these skills often have faded into a distant memory.
Ed Harvey, owner of Virginia Beach-based Advanced Training & Learning Technology LLC, develops advanced learning programs that are designed to help the math proficiency problem at the middle school, high school and college levels.
His program is designed to help students entering college to relearn forgotten math skills.
And so far, he's spent nearly $3 million to develop the content and create the program.
According to data gathered from the National Center for Education Statistics, 60 percent of high school graduates who attend college must take non-credit developmental math courses that repeat the math courses they had to complete in middle school and high school.
Developmental math courses are remedial courses designed to help students prepare to take college-level math.
According to the Report of a Workshop on Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics (STEM) Workforce Needs for the Department of Defense and the U.S. Industrial Base, only 13 percent of students who were labeled as STEM-proficient at the beginning of the ninth grade eventually completed a STEM degree.
There is a 40 percent attrition rate for STEM-proficient students who start a college STEM degree.
Harvey finds this statistic concerning, especially because many students who want to major in STEM subjects do not place out of the non-development math courses after performing poorly on the college math placement exam.
"The student math proficiency problem is a big drain on the economy for several reasons," Harvey said, "the main one being students who are not proficient at foundational arithmetic and algebraic concepts cannot qualify for a STEM job when they graduate from high school that doesn't require a college degree."
According to Burning Glass Technologies statistics, the supply of college graduates with STEM degrees is decreasing compared to the emerging demands of the job market. For those graduating college with a STEM degree, there are more than twice as many entry-level STEM job postings as there are non-STEM job postings.
What's more, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates the number of STEM jobs in the U.S. will increase by 17 percent between 2008 and 2018, and by 2018, the American job market will contain 30.4 million STEM jobs - an average annual increase of approximately 440,000 STEM jobs since 2008.
These statistics, Harvey says, prove the economic need for students to thrive in STEM-related subjects.
Harvey graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor of chemical engineering degree.
A veteran, Harvey flew F-14 jets for the Navy before consulting for a tech company in Boston.
In 1986, he co-founded BMH Associates Inc., a local defense contracting and simulation development company. In 2006, he sold BMH to Alion Science and Technology Corp., a larger engineering, IT and operations solutions company.
At the time, his kids were entering college, and Harvey thought he was retired.
It was at this time that he discovered that 60 percent of the college students who intend on graduating with a STEM major end up changing their major.
STEM students who score poorly on their math placement exams have to retake high school-level math courses that don't add credit toward their STEM degree, making it hard to graduate on time and adding thousands of dollars in extra classes, Harvey said.
"The problem wasn't that they couldn't do calculus, the problem was that they couldn't do fundamental math," he said. "Math is a building block, so it's problematic when you can't to basic arithmetic and basic algebra."
Harvey saw the need for a program that could help students redevelop their basic fundamental arithmetic and algebraic concepts before taking their college math placement exams.
"What is interesting is that unlike the prep industry established to prepare students for taking the SAT/ACT college admissions exams, no similar industry has been established to prepare students for taking a college math placement exam," he said. "This is the basis for the math remediation programs ATLT developed."
In 2010, Harvey and a team of experts did research to identify the set of math skills that were problematic for students with STEM majors.
"We found that they couldn't do basic sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade math," Harvey said. "We identified 130 math skills that deal with topics such as arithmetic, fractions, decimals, rates and ratios, and integers."
With the money he earned from selling BMH Associates, Harvey developed a program that would help repair math proficiency before students enter college.
"There's a big, billions-of-dollars industry for SAT and math tutoring, but there's no industry to support preparing students to take college-level math," he said. "And students don't understand that they need help."
Harvey hired a team of seven developers, two instructional designers and a content developer to help create the course.
ATLT developed an electronic program to help reinforce the same 130 math skills in a time-efficient manner. The program can be accessed through two different portals. One is a video game, and the other is a Web application.
"Students know video games," Harvey said. "It's in their DNA."
The game, Pi and the Lost Function, follows the avatar, Pi, on an adventure through the Town of Greenville. Pi sets out on a mission to help the people of Greenville regain their math skills by proving his math skills by solving a variety of problems.
The Web application offers the same math problems, without the video game.
Students can use either one or both.
Each program has 68 different lessons, with one to three skills per lesson. Students can ask for help through an online tutor. If the student answers a certain number of questions wrong, an intervention will take the student through a guided skill practice.
As students use the program, it uploads performance data onto a spreadsheet so that teachers, parents or tutors can view the student's performance in real time.
For each session, the performance data will be colored blue, green or yellow. Blue indicates that the student answered all the problems correctly, green indicates the student got two or fewer wrong and yellow indicates the student got three or more incorrect.
ATLT is working with Norfolk State University, Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College to help new students refresh their math skills.
The schools purchased the program and made it available to students who perform poorly on their math placement exams.
TCC recently notified 79 students who performed poorly on their math assessments that they could complete the ATLT program and qualify to retake the math placement exam.
Out of the 79 students who performed poorly, only one used the program.
Ojetta Fleming graduated from high school in 2002 and attended college briefly while working part- time. She dropped out of college and joined the workforce full-time. Now, 13 years after graduating from high school, she decided to re-enroll in college at TCC.
"After all these years, I could not imagine remembering equations, formulas or linear equations," Fleming said via an email. "Unfortunately, I only placed out of Math 2 and I was prompted to take non-credit classes, which would have cost me money and nothing toward my degree."
After using the program, she placed into the developmental math course needed for her degree.
The program took Fleming more than 32 hours to complete, four times longer than eight hours it takes the average student entering college.
The record for completing the course is two hours and 44 minutes, accomplished by an ODU engineering student.
Harvey says the program can help accomplish three goals: increase the number of students who graduate from middle school who are highly proficient in algebra, help high school students prepare to take the gateway college math course and help students survive in college.
"The solution is to let them leverage the knowledge that they already have," Harvey said.
ATLT also has partnered with the Connelly School of the Holy Child, a Potomac, Md., college prep school for girls in grades 6 to 12. The school bought the program for its students to use over the summer. Harvey said the school also uses it to help recognize which students have math proficiency problems and to help students prepare for the SATs.
Both the video game and Web programs are content agnostic, meaning that a subject-level expert could develop content for different subjects to be put into the program's template.
Harvey hopes to leverage the availability of subject-matter experts who already have developed content that can be packaged into a software-based teaching tool that can be used to address student proficiency problems in other subjects, such as chemistry, physics, English and grammar.
Next, Harvey plans to develop a chemistry-based program.