British Import Helps Florida Students Prepare for High School Exit Exams.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) has a new resource to help them prepare for their high school exit exams. OCPS is piloting an online HSEE prep program that hopped the pond last year and is steadily gaining ground in the United States.

The program from SAM Learning of the U.K. is entirely online so that OCPS students can use it at any time of the day or night to practice for the math and science portions of their High School Exit Exams. The company reports that a substantial amount of usage occurs outside of school hours suggesting that students realize the effort they put in to using the program can pay off with better results in school.

"Our program is student-driven meaning that we built it first to appeal to students and then we loaded it with content that is aligned to the state standards and is correlated to the state exit exams and high stakes tests like the FCAT," said David Jaffa, founder and president of SAM Learning of the U.K. "Students are motivated to use our program to study for their tests because they know that the time they spend using it will help them do better on their state exams."

SAM Learning's approach is different from other test prep programs in two ways: it uses a scaffolded pedagogy and it is student-driven, which allows students to navigate through the system in a manner that makes sense to them. Teachers can assign exercises or allow students to be self-directed and they can offer extra credit or class credits based on completed task hours.

"For the state of Florida, the SAM Learning program is a very good fit," said Yvonne Fonnett, coordinator for secondary science, curriculum services at OCPS. "We have the confidence of knowing that the math and science content is correlated with our standards and the students can pick concepts that have been highlighted as especially relevant to their high school exit exams."

The SAM Learning Company is located in the United Kingdom where over 50% of all the high schools use their product. The company began offering its research-proven test prep programs for math and science in the United States in spring 2008. Since introducing the product here, schools throughout the U.S. have pilot tested it including DeWitt Clinton High School in Bronx, New York. These schools report that the program is effective in preparing their students for exams just as it has been in the U.K., consequently, the number of subscribers is growing quickly.

Five years of independent research in the U.K. showed that students who used the SAM Learning program for over 10 hours scored significantly higher on their high school exit exams than those who had not used SAM Learning. The research also found that at-risk students -- including those who would be categorized as Title 1 or ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) in the U.S. -- showed the greatest gains.

See the HSEE prep program at the Florida Educational Technology Conference this week in exhibit booth 743 or visit www.samlearning.com for more information.

About SAM Learning U.K.

SAM Learning U.K. (www.samlearning.com) is based in London, England. The company publishes an online high school exit exam program for mathematics and science that is correlated to the state standards for CA, FL, GA, MA, MS, MI, MO, NY, PA, TX, VA and Washington DC. It is also aligned to the standards of the National Science Teachers Association and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For more information, call 800-481-8101 or email [e-mail].