A successful EMPower® pilot in Kentucky
Adult Education Students Gain Conceptual Understanding and Real-World Math Skills
Overview
Kentucky Adult Education (KYAE) Skills U helps adult students attain high school equivalency diplomas and prepare for college and career success.
Gayle Box, Senior Associate of College and Career Preparation, has worked for a decade to ensure adult students reach their goals. With KYAE Skills U’s adoption of the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) from the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education (OCTAE) in 2012, Gayle’s focus became the implementation of those standards.
“As part of our work with OCTAE’s Standards-in-Action initiative, we were asked to examine the extent to which our instructional resources aligned with the CCRS.” says Gayle. “We discovered that the EMPower series, which emphasizes a conceptual understanding of mathematics in real-world situations, aligns tightly to the CCR Standards for Mathematics (CCRSM), but very few of our programs were using it.”
To test EMPower’s effectiveness, KYAE Skills U conducted a pilot of EMPower in 2016–17 using the revised EMPower titles. The CCRSM advocate for focused instruction (deep, not wide), coherent instruction that connects ideas, and conceptual understanding balanced with procedural skill and fluency as applied to everyday situations. EMPower offered such instruction at a foundational level.