Education Innovation : Solutions for The Future

Innovation for success. If we stand in one place and hope others will do the heavy lifting, all is lost for prosperity. America is just starting to innovate, and through programs like this one and the Voucher programs, Charter and Private Schools, there is hope for our country.

Reasoning Mind Engages and Prepares STEM Students
Source: Lloyd Bentsen IV, "Reasoning Mind Engages and Prepares STEM Students," National Center for Policy Analysis, May 21, 2015.

May 26, 2015

It is a great time to be a STEM major in Texas, says NCPA senior research fellow Lloyd Bentsen. Dallas made Forbes‘s list of the top 10 cities for STEM jobs and has the second highest annual median wage growth for STEM workers, while Houston and Austin were named the top two metropolitan areas for STEM professionals in a Wallet Hub report. By 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects Texas will have 758,000 STEM jobs, second only to California.

On a recent visit to the Momentous School in Dallas, I saw students actively, enthusiastically engaged in learning math concepts and applying those concepts to solve problems ― thanks to a state-of-the-art online curriculum and teacher classroom structuring program called Reasoning Mind.
According to several evaluations, the Reasoning Mind program offers several advantages over outdated, lecture-based instruction:

• Reasoning Mind students are engaged and on task 89 percent of the time, on average. Compared to a typical classroom, that works out to an additional 40 hours of math instruction each year when Reasoning Mind is used as a core curriculum.
• Some 67 percent of students using Reasoning Mind say that their enjoyment of mathematics increased as a result of the program.
• In Angleton (Texas) Independent School District, students who used Reasoning Mind in 5th and 6th grades are more than twice as likely to accelerate into Algebra I in 8th grade as non-Reasoning Mind students.
• The key to Reasoning Mind and programs like it is flexibility: they deliver effective instruction for advanced students and remediation for struggling students and perform successfully in traditional school, after-school and home environments. They get students out of traditional lecture-based classroom desks.