Mindspark for Government Schools in India

Every child can learn with understanding.

Teaching might be the equivalent of asking humans to lift a 100kg weight. Surely the world champions - best teachers in the world can do it, but the majority of the teachers can’t - even when they have the intent. In that situation, we can provide positive incentives, motivation, or threats – but they still wouldn’t have the capacity to lift. If we really want our teachers to succeed and we want their intent to translate into outcomes, we need to provide them a lever and a fulcrum. Archimedes had once said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”. Most teachers intend and strive to move the world - by improving  learning of their students  in the class. Can technology be the lever and fulcrum for each teacher to lift outcomes?

A computer based personalized adaptive learning solution that determines a child’s current level is and what he/she should learn next at the child’s pace can add tremendous value to aid the teacher’s efforts. Mindspark shows promise to resolve the problems of heterogeneity and lack of teacher support since it can finely target each child's current learning level. This ensures that each child is receiving personalized support and instruction based on their specific learning needs. Hence, the teacher can focus on common misconceptions or learning gaps that are widespread in her class.

The ‘Mindspark’ personalized learning software has been iteratively developed with deployment across elite private schools as well as low-income government schools, and has been featured in a recent Harvard Business School Case Study. A recent RCT of the Mindspark Centres led by JPAL co-chair of Education - Prof Karthik Muralidharan, found large test score gains for students doing Mindspark compared to the control group after only 4.5 months of exposure. Treated students experienced double the test score gains of the control group in math, and 2.5 times the gains in Hindi language. Large and statistically significant improvements were found for all children, regardless of initial learning levels, gender, or socio-economic status.  The study also showed that Mindspark was able to effectively customize instruction to the needs of each student.  

We’re advancing on Adaptive learning. It is a method of 'CAL' that adapts to the pace, style and level of understanding of the student rather than assuming that the student’s level would correspond to his age/grade in school, the premise being that the learning pattern of each child is different.    

It builds on this premise and assesses the current understanding of each student and from there on progressively questions students about the concept. The rationale behind the questioning approach is that students learn when they have to think, either to answer a question/ to do an activity.

Our personalised, adaptive learning software relies on application of educational research as well advances in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence and media creation technologies. Mindspark,

• Includes extensive, high-quality instruction materials developed over several years of iterations.
• It is adaptive in the level of instruction. Mindspark does “Teaching at the right level ” technologically.
• It is adaptive in the approach: Even two students at the same level may be stuck for different reasons. Mindspark examines patterns of error to target “differentiated remedial instruction.”
• The interface requires constant engagement and is gamified.

• To provide a use-case for technology in school education to improve reading and basic mathematical skills among school going children by deploying it within the government system and thereby convincing state and national governments across the developing world to reform the existing ICT policy for education.
• To create a body of knowledge on student learning through a team of subject experts which will be published as a public good.
• Product Development to incorporate machine learning, artificial intelligence, speech to text and other modern technologies into the program so as to make it even more student friendly.  

With rising interest towards technology, its allocation in the government’s ICT policy is set to rise in the coming years and a growing realisation of the skills and competencies required, we have seen increased interest from all stakeholders ranging from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of Education to parents towards improving the learning outcomes of students, especially in public school setups. This political support, along with the reforms in the ICT policy gives us confidence that Mindspark will be scalable.

Education is a priority for the government in most parts of the world.We believe that the core problems tackled by Mindspark are similar in most developing countries – including low levels of teacher preparation, poor content knowledge, low time on task for students, and the challenge of handling heterogeneity in the classroom. Additionally, the program is not dependent on the skill of one person or the quality of their instruction.

We are optimistic that given the priority given to education and governments tendering large scale projects will enable us to scale and grow in impact.

The Mindspark program in its English and regional language variations has been running in private and government schools for the last 7 years. Over 100,000 students from Grades 1-10 annually in India and the Middle East use the program and till date about 500,000 students have used Mindspark since 2009.

In one year students over 300 govt. schools and in 5 years over 2000 schools will be using Mindspark  We expect to see children more confident in speaking, written expression, and comprehension of any appropriate text. They would be fearless of Math and would be able to use it in real life settings. Teachers would have bettered their pedagogical knowledge and teaching methodology of various concepts. School and district officials, parents and community will see the value of technology-aided learning as a means to improve student learning outcomes.

We envisage this because, more children will be learning with understanding!

The EI staff is a mélange of 250+ people with different work experience in the field of education. The team includes alumni from top schools of the world, university rank-holders at Ph.D. and Masters level in Science, Social Sciences and Humanities developing and running products and programs. The organisation has specialised internal teams working on test development, data science, educational research, psychometrics, personalised learning, and IT development. The rich experience of working on diverse impact related projects for various government agencies, multi-laterals and research organisations across India and the world, ensures EI’s staff to deliver for impact.

Our product for government schools began after getting a contract from Torrent Power Pvt Ltd to convert the program to Gujarati language, and deploy it to 20 rural government schools in Gujarat for 5 years. Subsequently, Central Square Foundation sponsored the deployment of the product in Hindi for 3-5 Centres that were set up in the urban slums of Delhi. This was followed by grants from Tech Mahindra, Porticus and internal EI resources.

Going forward we intend to tap into the Corporate Social Responsibility Act (which mandates that private Indian companies donate 2% of net profits to CSR), national and international philanthropy funding from multi-lateral agencies like USAID, GIF, etc and Central and state level Government spending into education.

At scale, Mindspark (including hardware, software, support, training, etc) will cost US$7 per child per year.  To put things in perspective, $US7 is less than ~5% of the current spending by the Indian government of US$140/child/year on school education. Thus, shifting around 5% of current spending in this direction could deliver a doubling in learning outcomes relative to status quo.

While other awards/grants focus more on the “narrative” of the investment case, SOLVE is unique in being that it pays equal or more attention to real evidence of impact. We believe that SOLVE and its community is an ideal platform to evangelise the value of or proposed approach and help Mindspark strategically for its,

Development of a fundraising strategy for scaling up the intervention

Marketing and Communication Marketing strategy for donor engagement

Showcasing and sharing EdTech knowledge and know-how with the world

Build insights to improve the efficacy of the product to solve for learning with interactions/feedback with experts 

We would love for SOLVE to help us in reaching scale by challenging the status quo and the existing mindsets that are in place for many of the teachers and government officials. We would thus reiterate during all teacher interactions and trainings that Mindspark does not intend to replace the teacher and, instead aims to support and aid teachers so that they can further guide their students to learn better. Solve can be instrumental in help us with partnerships to create more pilots to demonstrate the effectiveness of our programs, scale pilots and improve on-ground communication strategies.