Carnegie Learning, whose application of advanced research in cognition to math education has gained a wide acceptance among middle and high school programs in the United States, will extend its platform for educational software to high schools in Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile under agreement with Carnegie Mellon and universities in those five countries.
The Inter-American Development Bank, a major funder of educational and other programs in Latin America and the Caribbean, will finance the three-year initiative, which will develop Cognitive Tutor math software adapted to the cultures and languages of regions that stretch from the U.S. border to the lower tip of South America.
The initiative is a major international venture for the Pittsburgh-based firm, which has a long association with Carnegie Mellon in the development of software to enhance education with a combination of software and textbooks. The collaboration promises to deliver a technological boost to classrooms in the home countries of Latin American universities that have been collaborating in educational research with Carnegie Mellon for more than a decade.
“The work here is much more significant than changes in language alone, because it recognizes differences in teaching styles, educational context, resources, and culture and integrates these components throughout the Cognitive Tutor software,” said Dennis Ciccone, CEO of Carnegie Learning Inc.
“This partnership with Carnegie Learning, supported by IDB, allows us to focus on the improvement of math teaching and learning, which has been a seriously weak link in our educational system,” says Ignacio Casas, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.
Source: Carnegie Learning, Mary Murrin
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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