• Is Count Me Smart available for home schooling?

• Is Count Me Smart a full curriculum or an intervention?

• Is Count Me Smart standards based?

• Is Count Me Smart constructivist or "back-to-basics?

• What is the research base of Count Me Smart?

• What is the difference between Count Me Smart and other math computer programs?

• What is the target student population for Count Me Smart?

• What are the key innovations of Count Me Smart?

Is Count Me Smart available for home schooling?

Count Me Smart is an ideal intervention for home schooling because the lesson plans, worksheets, flashcards, and computer activity are self paced and available on-line.

Count Me Smart is a whole class intervention for teaching Number Sense and the Operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The pacing is designed to allow all students to learn the concepts, mental manipulations , facts, and computations of a given curricular year whiile leaving approximately 100 class sessions for students to learn the other key strands of local, state, and NCTM standards.

Currently, the Count Me Smart teachers' manual suggests the topics and timing for lessons pertaining to strands other than number and operations. A national team of educators, scientists, and elementary school practitioners is applying for a National Science Foundation grant to expand Count Me Smart to a full fledged 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade mathematics curriculum. Parties interested in joining the project should contact us.

Is Count Me Smart standards based?

Count Me Smart focuses predominantly on NCTM's strand of Number Sense and Operations. Count Me Smart adheres to all of the NCTM's Process Standards: Problem Solving, Reasoning and Proof, Communications, Connections, and Representation; and the NTCM's Overall Principals: Equity, Curriculum, Teaching, Learning Principal, Assessment, and Technology.

A national team of educators, scientists, and elementary school practitioners is applying for a National Science Foundation grant to expand Count Me Smart to a full fledged 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade mathematics curriculum that fully adheres to national, state, and local standards. Parties interested in joining the project should contact us.

Is Count Me Smart constructivist or "back-to-basics?

Educators battle over how to teach arithmetic. Constructivists argue that students learn best by "discovering" and "constructing" their own understanding of the underlying principles of math. Back-to-basics advocates argue that students must learn basic facts and computational skills. Curricula written by one side usually completely ignore key components advocated by the other side.

Count Me Smart encompasses the best of constructivist and back-to-basic philosophies. A typical Count Me Smart lesson lasts two weeks. Several days are devoted to whole-class and small-group constructivist lessons that help students progress from physical representation, to drawing and manipulative representation, to constructed algorithms, to traditional paper and pencil algorithms. Once students are comfortable with traditional algorithms, they are encouraged to build fluency by completing word and computational problems.

What is the research base of Count Me Smart?

Count Me Smart is a "best practice" elementary school intervention based upon an intervention conceptualized by Richard Oldrieve, a 14-year veteran of the Cleveland Municipal School District, who tested it over a ten-year period while teaching students with learning disabilities.

Count Me Smart is being developed at Acme Express, Inc., whose president, Don Scipione, Ph.D., has a forty-year history of developing research-based software and has been developing education software since 1995. Development has been funded a peer-reviewed Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

What is the difference between Count Me Smart and other math computer programs?

Computer activity is one component of Count Me Smart. There is a constructivist component comprised of group lessons and abstract theoretical ideas and a "back-to-basics" component comprised of worksheets, word problems and flash cards. All three components-constructivist group lessons, individual back to basics drills, and computer activities-- are thoroughly integrated and reinforce each other.

The Count Me Smart on-line activities design criteria



• reinforce the constructivist discovery and back-to-basics computational skills taught in the lesson
  
  
• provide a fun enticement that offers immediate feedback and gratification
  
  
• randomly change activity expression so that, each time the activity is accessed, the student learns the same lesson but never knows exactly which version will be presented. For example, the "add one" activity may have a mouse helping count balloons, a wizard counting flying saucers, etc.
  
  
• eliminate reliance on upon written messages and student's reading ability or even the English language. Activities must be intuitive and self-explanatory and rely on communicating using well-known logos like stop signs.
  
  
• employ graphical user interface with point and click mechanisms that are touch screen compatible
  
  
• incorporate an adjustable timing mechanism that allows variation in the time between question and answer (time out period). The time out period may then be adjusted to compensate for different ability levels-long time out for severely handicapped and very short for the gifted. Timing may be shortened as the student masters the topic, similar to the "higher levels" employed in the typical video games.
  
  
• track student progress and return each student to where they were when they last logged off.

The target student population for Count Me Smart is any classroom that has a moderate to high percentage of at-risk students.

• urban classrooms
• first ring suburban classrooms
• inclusion-based classrooms that mix special educations students with the general population.

There are three key innovations.

• First, Count Me Smart focuses on Number Sense and Operations, skills that are woefully inadequate in 60% of our target student population.
  
  
• Second, the order in which Number Sense and Operations is taught is more developmentally appropriate.
  
  
• Third, the on-line game component and its delivery over the Internet serve as an enticement to motivate students to complete assignments more quickly and accurately.