Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg (Part 2)

SM: What kinds of learning challenges do you help your students to overcome?

RV: A lot of students have a hard time reading long passages. They read something and then realize they have no idea what they just read. To counter this, we teach kids how to actively read by asking themselves questions after each sentence. Techniques like that keep them engaged in the reading material. On the math side, when kids encounter a problem they do not know how to solve, they often freeze up. We have techniques to help them with that.

A lot of kids have huge anxiety grasping the exam environment concepts of the SAT or ACT. These are high-stakes tests, and students know it. We have a test zone which helps to ease anxiety, keep them focused, and help them to adapt to a five-hour test environment.

SM: What about the content itself? American high school kids come to high school with a very weak math background.

RV: Unfortunately, that can be the case. We tend to find the content tested on the exam stops at tenth grade math. By the time they are taking this course they are in their eleventh grade year, so sometimes students have forgotten some lessons. We really try to focus on the areas where students have deficiencies and give them instruction pertaining to those specific areas.

SM: How do you find those delinquencies?

RV: There are two ways. The first is through a private tutor physically sitting by the student. That is the best way. We train our tutors to look for specific points of weakness. Tutors watch every step of the way as the student is working on a practice problem. Our online solution identifies every question that a student has missed. When they go online later, it will again ask them the questions they missed. If they get the questions wrong a second time, the system will then provide detailed instructions explaining how to answer the question.

The practice problem might say, “If you have a triangle with angle measures x, 3x and 5x, what is the value of x?” In our program, if a student answers incorrectly, our software steps back and asks the student a more basic question such as, “How many degrees are in a triangle?” We break problems down to the basic level to determine where the issues lie.

One of the big problems of the testing culture is that it creates a singular focus on outcomes. Focusing only on what the right answer is means that students lose focus on the process of analytic thinking. Our approach centers on the analytic thinking process. Everything is about reinforcing the process of thinking and determining what relevant information should be considered. We speed up the delivery of relevant information to a student’s exact point of need, which creates an incredibly engaging experience.

SM: Are your group classes and private tutoring sessions delivered online as well?

RV: Group classes tend to be face-to-face with one instructor for 25 students. Tutoring sessions are offered online as well as in our brick-and-mortar locations. When we first started the company, we knew there was a good opportunity to use technology to make students’ experiences better. Nobody ever questioned the convenience of an online tutor. People have questioned whether you could provide as engaging of an experience in a virtual interface as you could in a face-to-face interface.

We have trained our instructors to use certain techniques for virtual tutoring. Students find that virtual tutoring is a much more convenient option and that our tutors are just as engaging virtually as they are face-to-face.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Helping Failing High School Students Pass: Revolution Prep Founders Ramit Varma and Jake Neuberg
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