One of the new units in Algebra II for 2009
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Spring Product Release Announcement

Carnegie Learning is pleased to announce that the 2009-2010 version of the Cognitive Tutor® Software has been released! Loaded with new features and enhancements – many of them inspired by teacher and administrator requests – this is one of the most exciting releases in our company's history!

New tools and features added to the Teacher's Toolkit application support teaching with Cognitive Tutor® software even better than before. Now teachers have more command to tightly integrate Cognitive Tutor software into the core curriculum, or supplement a core curriculum or text, or deliver interventions to remediate and maximize student learning.

The new software will be available to all of our existing customers starting June 1, 2009. In an effort to help you manage your upgrade and easily communicate your priorities and preferences to our support team, you can schedule your update and data migration online by visiting the Migration Form on the Carnegie Learning® Resource Center. Using the Migration Form, you can choose your preferred date to upgrade to the new release, and also have the opportunity to add an additional person to be your school's technical point of contact. A customer support representative will then contact you to confirm the details of your upgrade as well as answering any questions you have about the product update.

We are excited for all of our customers to use this new version of the Cognitive Tutor® software. For detailed information about all of the new enhancements and additions, read the articles that follow in this newsletter.

Teacher’s Toolkit Enhancements

Curriculum Browser
Based on requests and suggestions from current customers, this powerful new feature allows instructors to view and print detailed information about each curriculum from within the Teacher’s Toolkit, including unit, section and lesson content.

Furthermore, instructors now have the ability to launch Cognitive Tutor lessons in an “Instructor Preview” mode. Instructors can view and work through any problem in the curricula. In addition, instructions can view each individual student’s progress on a particular Cognitive Tutor problem, with the option to intervene and teach the problem from the student’s current state.

Finally, the Curriculum Browser feature allows you to tag a list of “favorite” units in the Cognitive Tutor curricula. Tagged units can be viewed in the “Create Custom Curriculum” tool and can be inserted into a custom curriculum sequence. Once a custom curriculum sequence is published it will appear in the Curriculum Browser for reference.

The New Curriculum Browser
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Custom Curriculum Advisor
The Custom Curriculum Advisor is a new feature enhancement in the “Create Custom Curriculum” tool. It provides real-time feedback while planning and constructing a custom curriculum sequence with Cognitive Tutor curricula. The Custom Curriculum Advisor identifies pre-requisite units, redundancies across units, or dependencies between units of math instruction. You can use this data to adjust your curriculum sequence before you save and publish it for use in your classroom. There is even an “Order for Me” option that automatically arranges selected units to accommodate dependencies between math topics.

Assessment Reports
Data is an important tool for personalizing instruction and ensuring that students are progressing at an appropriate pace to master concepts and skills. Teachers can now access four new reports that illustrate performance on pre- and post-tests in the Cognitive Tutor Software, including:

• Student Report By Problem – View how a student performed on each problem in the assessment. Plus see the scored response, correct answer, and the student’s answer.
  
• Class Report By Problem – Shows a class summary for each core problem in the assessment.
  
• Student Report by Topic – See a summary of a student’s strengths and weaknesses by mathematical topic.
  
• Class Report by Topic – See a class summary of students’ strengths and weaknesses by mathematical topic.

New Units of Instruction: Algebra II
With many states now requiring end-of-course exams, we know that your students need more help than ever to make sure that they are on track to master mathematical concepts and skills. Carnegie Learning is pleased to announce that we have updated our Cognitive Tutor® Algebra II curriculum for 2009-2010 – the curriculum is closely aligned to the Achieve's rigorous mathematics benchmarks.

The Cognitive Tutor® software has been updated with 13 new units of instruction, providing more depth of instruction than ever before. Some of the included units include:

• Functions: Understanding what a function is, graphing functions, function notation, working with functions, domain, range and inverses.
  
  
• Rational Equations: Setting up and solving rational equations to model real world scenarios with simple rations building to more complex equations.
  
  
• Statistics: Creating/reading/comparing box and whisker plots, calculating variance and standard deviation.

Cognitive Tutor® Algebra II can be used to supplement your curriculum or be paired with our Carnegie Learning Algebra II text for a core curriculum implementation.

New Skills Practice Materials
In cases where there is limited access to technology and our textbooks are being used as one of the sources of primary instruction, we’ve produced additional skills practice activities in print form to aid student mastery of key math concepts. The skills practice activities are unique because they go beyond offering simple math drills. The skills practice materials are designed to provide targeted practice on key skills from lessons. Students receive additional practice on rich, contextual math problems. Finally, some activities help students reinforce their understanding of math terminology.

The skills practice content will be available for download by August 1, 2009 from the Carnegie Learning® Resource Center.

Stimulus Connection
Monies from the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, Title I, and IDEA Part B programs of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act can be applied to purchase of Carnegie Learning® textbooks and software. Policy guidance from the U.S. Department of Education recommends educators consider use of technology to improve teaching and learning. An example provided was purchasing a “high-quality curriculum aligned with standards with embedded assessments”. For a limited time, Carnegie Learning is offering a special offer for subscriptions to Cognitive Tutor software to help educators stretch their stimulus funding and provide access to proven secondary math instruction. The details for the offer can be found at http://mathrelief.carnegielearning.com/

Cognitive Tutor Software is based upon 20+ years of research into how students think and learn. It stands apart from other curricula for strengthening student conceptual understanding of secondary mathematics. Cognitive Tutor software engages students to learn with adaptive learning technologies, including task-based lessons, immediate feedback, and embedded, continuous formative assessment.

2009 Math Webinar Series

You can still watch our FREE online events (previously recorded) at http://www.carnegielearning.com/events

National and Regional Trade Shows:

AWSP/WASA Summer Conference
June 28 - June 30, 2009
Spokane, WA

Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teaching
July 15 - July 17, 2009 Houston, TX
http://www.camtonline.org/

National Educational Computing Conference
June 28 - July 1, 2009
Washington, DC
Booth #3710 & 3712

Noel-Levitz National Conference
July 21 - July 24, 2009
San Antonio, TX

For additional event listings visit:
http://www.carnegielearning.com/company_news_events.cfm

For more information on Carnegie Learning curricula or services, please contact us at info@carnegielearning.com or use our contact form.

www.carnegielearning.com