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Little Thinking Minds
Executive Summary
Project Host:
Fellows:
Daniel Ansari, Research Fellow
Catherine Soler, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Jazib Zahir, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Introduction
Little Thinking Minds (LTM) is an edtech company with two core digital products for Arabic language learning for native speakers and Arabic language learners. LTM sells its software to 700+ schools in the MENA region and is seeking to grow its user base and scale its impact beyond the 450,000+ students it touches now. Through this LEAP project, LTM sought to:
Bring more scientific evidence into its product and demonstrate student learning outcomes
Understand areas of improvement for user retention
Organization’s role & strength
The organization is mission-driven and is attempting to make Arabic language learning engaging through a gamified platform with some traction across several major Arabic-speaking territories. There are ambitious growth plans to enter new regions (like Iraq) and even reach out to countries where Arabic is learned primarily for religious reasons. But the organization understands that this is a competitive market with many similar public and private sector initiatives. It is quite difficult to make learning Arabic engaging and interesting given it is often not central to long-term success in educational curricula across the MENA region. LTM also realizes that to stay on a trajectory of growth with potential for additional funding, it needs to understand how learning outcomes are measured, whether its approach is consistent with the latest in learning (especially reading) science and engineering and whether it is adopting the best approaches to measuring and improving retention, the user interface and gamification.
Need summary
We can separate the organization’s needs in three areas:
Scientific evidence / Learning outcomes
User engagement and retention
Relaying the integration of more scientific rigor in its messaging
Scientific evidence / Learning outcomes
The LEAP team focused on educating the organization on the “Science of Reading” (SoR) and the potential avenues to design and modify the product based on scientific evidence on how individuals learn to read and how we should teach reading. For instance, LTM products utilize leveled readers, an approach that is centered around assigning primarily those books to children that best match their current reading level. While this sounds like a reasonable approach, the LEAP team advises that LTM understand the limitations of a product utilizing leveled readers based on current research.
User engagement and retention
LTM expressed interest in the LEAP team identifying best practices around retention, user-interface design and gamification to drive engagement. This input was being given in the spirit of some specific feedback as well as general frameworks for experimentation and assessment that LTM can follow in the future.
Solution summary & next steps
Ultimately, we have identified three key recommendations:
An overview of SoR and how it is relevant to the context of LTM with a view of explaining to them how evidence-based learning outcomes can be measured and which aspects they should be aware of in thinking about their own learning outcomes.
An overview of the game design providing precise feedback on user design, engagement and retention strategies. This includes feedback from people with specialized knowledge in these domains and references to comparable successful products. The purpose of this overview is to provide a framework in which LTM can plan future experiments and approaches to gamification and enhanced user engagement.
Review LTM marketing and fundraising materials to integrate messaging around using the SOR or other evidence-based approaches in the curriculum.