SKALO

In Latin America 50% of children and adolescents are in a situation of educational vulnerability and 37% of students drop out of school (UNESCO). Educational vulnerability corresponds to the fragile situation that some students find when experiencing difficulties throughout their school trajectory that can reduce their participation, permanence, and progress in class. This can be caused by several reasons such as: emotional, interpersonal factors, learning difficulties, behavioral problems, school demotivation caused by the virtuality of COVID, or special educational needs due to diagnoses or disability conditions.  Teachers are faced with the challenge of educating a classroom with diversity and students facing educational vulnerability and at the same time requiring an adapted and personalized way of teaching that allows all students to reach their full potential.

Skalo's technology primarily benefits teachers, calculating personalized strategies and tools to support students facing academic vulnerability.  These personalized strategies and tools allow the teacher to give instructions in a variety of ways, that support individual and group work, and encourage interaction amongst peers. Additionally, Skalo allows the teacher to set clear objectives for students facing difficulties and monitor their progress according to the personalized strategies they implement. With Skalo, the teacher strengthens their abilities to manage learning diversity in the classroom, as they receive strategies and calculated adjustments for each individual case, as well as allowing them to identify the effectiveness of those strategies to generate good inclusion practices and diversity management. The student benefits from Skalo by receiving support and strategies specific to their needs that allow them to close learning gaps when facing vulnerability.

Educational institutions find in Skalo a way to personalize strategies that support students who face temporary or permanent learning barriers. Skalo becomes a data center for students with academic vulnerability that allows the management of student’s track record and progress, as well as make data-driven pedagogical decisions. Centralizing student information facilitates advancement through the school system, interaction with external therapists, handling reports required by law, and interacting with the family to create a team around the student. With Skalo, teachers reduce the time spent generating adjustments and instructions for each student, going from spending 8 hours to just doing it in 30 minutes.

With Skalo, teachers adapt the way they teach as well as the way each student learns, making teaching more flexible by using technology to guarantee the participation, progress and permanence of any student in the system.

Our platform seeks to facilitate the teacher’s work in the classroom by using technology to customize strategies and adjustments that some students require.  In educational institutions of low socioeconomic levels, where there are no support professionals for the students that require it, Skalo becomes the alternative to manage diverse learning. The need for this, was observed by the founder of Skalo at the Zero to Three Foundation (https://ceroatres.org), which she co-founded on behalf of her son with cerebral palsy, where she saw how vulnerable populations, over the course of ten years, where in desperate need of a more inclusive school system for students facing learning barriers.

This is why she developed an algorithm in excel that allowed her to work hand in hand with teachers from low-income educational institutions, to suggest, according to each specific case that constitutes on a student with a disability, the necessary adjustments and strategies that could support their participation in the classroom. Looking at Skalo's data and impact, the team realized that this not only benefited students with a disability, but also students who presented barriers when learning. With the existing algorithms the team calculated adjustments for students who suffered from domestic violence, malnutrition, and lack of motivation. We then converted that algorithm into software and piloted about 60 institutions with 500 students, ages 2 to 18 from all socioeconomic strata for a year.

We used starter and closing surveys to measure the effectiveness of the platform and assess whether the adjustments were relevant and whether the technology eased the efficient adjustment determining process for students with difficulties. 80% of teachers considered that the adjustments suggested by the platform were specific according to the needs of each student and determined that they had a positive impact when implemented.

During the first year in which Skalo was created, we have spoken with more than 1000 teachers, in focus group mode, to understand the difficulties and needs that arise when managing a classroom with different learning rhythms. We used design thinking methodology with prototypes to simulate Skalo functionalities that allow them to facilitate their curricular planning and the prioritization of learning.

The feedback we got from teachers made us see the need to improve Skalo and relate it to the school curriculum; in this way the new version allows us to see what learning processes represent greater difficulty for some students and suggest to the teacher a different and clearer way to orient the way they impart said knowledge, so that students who face learning barriers can learn according to their abilities. During our research, 86% of teachers would use Skalo again.

In July of this year we will begin to work with our allies United Way, the Saldarriaga Concha Foundation, the Barco Foundation and ISA, in 80 pilots from 9 cities in Colombia, positively impacting around 2,560 students and 375 teachers; likewise, we will continue to carry out start and end surveys in each pilot, we will generate constant spaces for exploration through workshops, focus groups, interviews and meeting groups with teachers, educational institutions and parents that allow us to improve and innovate our platform based on our user’s needs. 

According to reports from the National Ministry of Education of Colombia (MEN), out of 100 students, 56 do not graduate from the school system because they face different difficulties throughout their school career. First, Skalo provides educational institutions and teachers a technological platform that will allow them to easily calculate personalized strategies and tools to support students facing academic vulnerability by decreasing the time they currently use to analyze each specific student facing barriers and measure the impact of adjustments during their implementation.

With our theory of change, we are convinced that teachers will reduce the time spent in the process of generating adjustments for their students, they will feel more prepared when it comes to diversity and inclusion management within the classroom by receiving, from Skalo, the suggestions adapted to a student’s needs and will have the ability to measure the effectiveness and impact of each adjustment implemented by keeping track of the student's progress by setting measurable and achievable goals. By using Skalo only thirty minutes a teacher can get a per-student adjustment plan with clear, measurable goals that gives them a clear roadmap to be able to handle more complex than average student cases.

In addition, to achieve this long-term result, we are aware that families are fundamental in the student's life, which is why we are working to involve the families, so that they can be informed of their child’s progress and apply adjustments at home to support them.  Educational institutions find in Skalo the way to measure and support new inclusive practices in the classroom, understanding through data how to better educate each type of student according to their needs.  We seek to create a tripartite team, between the teacher, the family, and the institution to support and monitor students who are vulnerable in order to increase their school achievement.

On the other hand, we hope to transform education towards inclusion-based methods. A teacher’s monthly use of Skalo, allows for a follow-up of the implementation of the suggested adjustments to be able to find good, inclusive practices at the time of imparting instruction, to support classwork and homework, and to evaluate the student who without a personalized strategy may be at risk of not reaching his maximum potential or even deserting the school system.

We are currently collecting data that shows how our platform generates impact amongst our users. The information that we have been able to collect, through surveys, focus groups, workshops with the design thinking methodology and interviews, allows us to identify that for 90% of the teachers who use Skalo, the adjustments that the platform gave them are useful and very effective when employing them with a student facing a learning difficulty. Additionally, 70% of teachers consider that with Skalo the adjustment generating process is shorter. While the teacher's perception is positive about the impact of Skalo's adjustments, we have not yet developed a comparison with a control group that would allow us to move to the third level of the Nesta Evidence Standards. With the pilots that will commence in July 2022 in which 2,500 students of vulnerable population in 9 cities of Colombia, we will be able to follow by courses in more than 32 school institutions, allowing us a comparison between classes and between students with a learning diagnosis with Skalo and without Skalo.

The commencing pilots will have a focus group before, during and at the end of the piloting. We will conduct NPS and perception surveys among teachers to verify how the strategies they implemented from the adjustment plan that Skalo provides have a positive impact on students, evaluate the reduction of time spent in the formulation of adjustments, in curricular and learning planning, as well as measuring how technology facilitates the process of efficient adjustment determination for struggling students.

Parallel to this, we have ideation workshops and focus groups with teachers from all areas to identify possibilities for improvement and new functionalities to be developed in the platform to facilitate teaching and planning in classrooms with learning diversity.

Finally, we have workshop spaces with parents of children who face learning barriers, to understand a little more of this population’s needs and socialize the use of technology to support these students.

With the evidence gathered in interviews, surveys, workshops and focus groups, we have identified the need for teachers to employ tools that allow them to set clear objectives with students facing difficulties, relying on research and international conferences such as the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education or the Mobile Learning Week, we were able to establish that technology can reduce learning differences, support a teacher’s development, and improve the quality and relevance of learning. Based on this, we formulate the following indicators that will allow us to measure Skalo’s impact.

• Percentage of improvement of a student when receiving adjustments in the following dimensions from the baseline of the pedagogical assessment.
  • Executive functions
  • Self-esteem
  • Social Interaction
  • Cognition
  • Autonomy
  • Fine and gross motor skills
  • Attention
  • Memory
  • Sensory
  • Verbal and non-verbal communication
  • Numerical reasoning
  • Reading
  • Writing
• Reduction of the time spent by the teacher during adjustment planning.
• Increase in the number of active teachers and students on the Skalo platform.

Technology teachers to manage the diversity of learning and inclusion, customizing adjustments and strategies for students in academic vulnerability.

Skalo would benefit from integrating data analytics into our theory of change by showing the impact each setting and strategy has o students facing a learning barrier and determining inclusive practices that encourage engagement, progress, and permanence in the school system. LEAP Fellows can help us analyse the data to determine: What are the most impactful accommodations and strategies on students with attention, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and learning difficulty or disability diagnoses?

Within the deliverables that we consider would be useful for our project, we hope to build:

• A strategy to generate a gamification of teachers on the platform to reward and encourage them to make adjustments and implement inclusive practices.
• The generation of an index that allows us to see the impact of Skalo in the case of educational vulnerability, measuring the impact of each adjustment according to the type of barrier.
• A strategy to include the student in the use of the platform, allowing them to participate in the determination and implementation of adjustments and support to face their academic vulnerability, teaming up with a teacher and their family.
• The analysis of the data already collected by Skalo where the main barriers faced by the piloted students are identified, finding patterns according to the type of population analyzed.
• A comparison in the data already collected by Skalo of the impact by adjustment in the different dimensions that are measured in a student (executive functions, cognition, reading, writing, self-esteem, autonomy, sensory, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, social interaction, verbal, non-verbal, numerical reasoning) to determine good practices for managing learning diversity.

To achieve a successful result for Skalo, we understand that it is our users, the teachers, who provide feedback in the improvements and innovation designing process, so in our second MVP we use design thinking co-creation workshops to understand their needs and develop functionalities that facilitate their day and their management of a diverse classroom.

Being part of a LEAP project will allow us to better analyze existing data to implement machine learning processes that determine patterns in the impact of adjustments. Additionally, it will allow us to generate indicators to measure Skalo’s impact and include the student within the platform, since today it is only used by teachers.

 We hope that in 5 years Skalo will be the platform that facilitates learning diversity management and inclusion in Latin America by creating a team between the family, the teacher, the student and the institution, where the teacher finds the support to handle more complex cases, the family can follow up and participate with adjustments at home,  the student can weigh in and suggest ways to receive support and the institution has the data to make informed pedagogical decisions.

Sources

https://www.abc.com.py/edicion...

Diaz, C. & Pinto, M.L. (2017). Educational vulnerability: A study from the socio-critical paradigm. Educational Praxis, 21

Manzano Soto, N. (2008). Young people in a context of vulnerability and the need for a comprehensive school. Teaching, 35 (7): 50-57.