Igniting civic agency among mexican youth and children

The problem that our proposed solution targets relates to the inadequacy of Mexico's educational system, which fails to provide children with the necessary skills to develop a strong foundation of civic responsibility and agency. This results in a lack of ability among children to make informed decisions and effectively navigate their lives.

The reasons behind the low quality of the education students receive are several. Teacher strikes are common causing classes to be canceled regularly and for extended periods. Nearly all of our students are from public schools, and according to the OCDE in 2019, 45% of Mexican students had learning deficiency in reading, 56% in math, and 47% in science. Plus, due to the pandemic in 2020, Mexicans reached an educational gap of up to two school years, according to the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO). With the 1999 reform, the subject Civic and Ethics Education (“Formación Cívica y Ética”) was incorporated into the secondary curriculum (and into the primary level in 2002) to develop student democratic competencies and skills, giving more emphasis to the role of school experiences as part of the development of citizenship.  In spite of these changes in the curriculum of civic education in Mexico, there has been limited evidence that changes in teacher practice and school culture are taking place in ways that would support students’ experiencing democratic relationships in schools and engaging in democratic practices.  In particular, Reimers and Cardenas (2010) found that political knowledge, attitudes, and engagement of youth in Mexico have not changed in the last years. Other studies have also documented a lack of attention in and political apathy about formal political institutions in spite of more engagement in other forms of participation with community and grassroots associations (Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001).

JANN is an organization whose main objective is to reduce the educational gap in Mexico by providing free online tutoring sessions on different subjects to public school students.  Given the poor situation in schools in Mexico, without any external support and opportunities like the ones JANN provides, the possibilities of causing long-term impact to improve learning and ignite civic agency are almost non-existent.

JANN is a free online math tutorial program. We deliver free online math tutoring sessions for children between 3rd and 10th grade. We link university students as tutors to younger, low-income students throughout Mexico.

We want to generate agents of civic change. Our innovation consists of launching a 10-week summer program with 5-hour-week classes where our regular math curriculum is taught Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a civic agency development program is taught on Tuesday and Thursday.

Tutors sign up on an online platform and complete a series of surveys and training and attend an online interview to be approved to participate. students sign up on the same platform and complete baseline surveys to be eligible to participate. Students are then grouped in groups of 5 and assigned a tutor who works with them for 10 weeks. During these weeks, we have automated the monitoring process to ensure tutors deliver the classes. Tutors need to upload an attendance report accompanied by all the recordings of the class; if they don’t, the system warns them, and after two weeks of inactivity, we remove them from the program. We also message parents whenever the tutor reports that they didn’t attend to follow up and help them solve issues with the platform. 

We will measure the impact of the new curriculum of the program through a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) consisting of first selecting 2,000 students and 500 tutors and randomly assigning them to treatment and control. All groups take the same math curriculum, but what would change is the civic action program.

The control group teaches a history course with the objective that can benchmark what happens when tutoring does not have content explicitly designed to improve civic agency. 

In the treatment, we will teach Scratch. Scratch is the largest community of free kids coding and programming language with a visual interface that empowers youngsters to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch promotes a computational mindset and conflict resolution skills, self-expression, and collaboration. Roque et al. (2016) found that kids belonging to the scratch community would often start projects to change the world in a better way. For example, there was a big project against animal testing. The explanation regarding why kids would organically engage in civic activities is proposed to be that by giving kids a space where they can design a project and have full agency, an innate sense of purpose will be enabled. The theory, then is that kids have a constant, sometimes latent, desire to improve their communities; however, their lack of agency and power to create hinders that will. Scratch will be accompanied by exercises derived from reading the  “Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Each chapter will be accompanied by a guided discussion with questions and reflection exercises that allow the child to build core skills to make conscious decision-making, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, critical thinking, and responsible decision-making. 

The project's direct beneficiaries are part of two very important communities in Mexico. The first community is formed by primary and middle school students from public schools that are receiving tutoring sessions, and the second one is by university students who work as tutors to fulfill their social service requirements. We will be working with regular beneficiaries of the tutoring platform who are interested in participating in activities during the summer. 

Current student beneficiaries go from 3rd grade to 9th grade, and 93% of them are enrolled in a public school in Mexico. They mainly live in one of our partner states: Aguascalientes, Baja California, Estado de México, Durango, Sinaloa, Puebla, and Yucatán. Our students are mainly between 8 and 15 years old and 53% of them are female. More than half of them are in the bottom two quintiles of the income distribution (self-reported). About 40% of them don’t have any family members that went to university,  60% don’t own a computer and about 20% of them do not have access to wifi. On the side of the tutors, 51% of our current tutors are female. Their ages mostly (90% of them) range from 18 to 31 years old and are studying in a wide range of fields from education to engineering, biology, and economics. Most of our current tutors come from Tecnológico de Monterrey, UVM, and UNITEC, the 3 biggest private universities as well as UNAM, the biggest public university in Mexico, but we also have alliances with la Salle and ITAM, among others. 

Among the indirect beneficiaries of the program, we contemplate the parents and families of the students who receive free tutoring weekly. Plus, the teachers and school staff who invite their students to enroll in our program. They also receive the opportunity to follow up on their student’s attendance and examination results through our platform.

Our team is uniquely positioned to represent and serve the community of children and university students in Mexico. Our team comprises individuals born and raised in Mexico, giving us a deep understanding of the local culture, values, and challenges. 

Co-founders Salome and Bernardo have firsthand experience working with marginalized communities, particularly children in remote rural areas and those at risk of dropping out of school, and have also worked as tutors in JANN. Salome and project manager Fernanda participated in a program to empower these children and women by providing them with tools to build a community and businesses. Bernardo developed a startup that focused on making psychometric tests and data analysis for schools to understand who and why students dropped out, giving them the necessary tools to provide targeted help to those in need.

Institutions team member Maria has also worked on projects to build social integration for children with special needs through sports. Additionally, our team includes Ivan, who studied his undergraduate degree in UNITEC and is one of our main partners providing tutors and students. Ivan was an outstanding tutor in JANN before joining our team as a staff member.

Our team's diverse experiences and backgrounds enable us to effectively address the unique needs of Mexico's children and university students. In JANN, we have been able to connect these communities for more than two years and have coordinated our 4500 and accompanied them in the task of impacting more than 18,000 students. 

Salome and Bernardo are current MIT PhD candidates in the Department of Economics and the Institute of Data Systems and Society respectively. Among our strengths are developing technologies such as web development, data analysis, and creating bots, among others. We have created of long-lasting allies to fulfill JANN's mission. Plus, we also have extensive experience in the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs). We have four ongoing research projects about different topics. We have achieved these goals with a budget of under 170,000 USD and a team of 8 people. 

JANN now has a solid foundation made up of a collaborative educational community. Plus, we have evidence-based results that measure the success of the program. It is now ready to expand further and learn about the impact of implementing a new curriculum focused on developing civic action among participants.

We hope that MIT Solve will help us strengthen other parts of our organization where we don't have as much experience. First, we would greatly benefit from accessing the MIT Solve network to give our program exposure and potentially start new collaborations to reach more ambitious goals and make a real impact on children worldwide.  

Second, we seek to improve and strengthen our institution financially so that it is a sustainable program in the long term. For this, we are testing various fundraising strategies and plan to charge state governments for our services as well. However, we would like to learn as much as possible about fundraising in Mexico and the United States.

Third, we are a new team and Bernardo and Salome are still learning how to be good leaders and decision-makers.  

We also seek help improving the public relations strategy so that our program is better known. This would facilitate the work of recruiting allies to incorporate students and tutors. In the long term, we seek to be a nationally recognized program so that growth at scale is sustained. Solve can also allow us to meet other people involved in similar areas of work that can spark potential collaborations.

JANN has the following advantages over existing alternatives:

1) Measured impact.  One way our program stands out is that measuring is our strength we work as an education lab where we test different interventions such as how to form the groups, match tutors to students and the content taught in class. For instance, we ran a randomized controlled trial to understand the better composition of the groups we learned that assigning students to groups based on their performance did not affect learning but accompanying tutoring with a social and emotional learning class as opposed to history classes increased math learning in 0.09 sd. We now want to use existing tests and surveys, as well as develop new methods, to measure gains in civic agency and critical learning. 

We also ask tutors and parents for consent to analyze the recordings of classes for research purposes. We are using NLP and audio processing on the recordings of the classes to better understand what teaching styles are more successful and the mechanisms driving the effects of the interventions that we have tested so far.

2)Sustainable (technology-based solution).  Our main advantage is that we make use of technology to pair students with tutors and train them, plus monitor our tutors. Meaning we are creating an infrastructure that will stay in the long run. This allows us to work with a larger number of participants at a very low marginal cost per participant. We also have developed the know-how to screen irresponsible tutors by monitoring and replacing them if needed while maintaining communication with parents and tutors. This platform is always being updated and improved so that our different partners can also have access to relevant information about their affiliates.

3) Cost-effective. First, all of our tutors are either fulfilling their social service requirements or volunteering their time, thus receiving no payment. Secondly, we have automated most of the administrative and logistic tasks in the program. This automation has enabled us to coordinate over 18,000 participants and 4,500 tutors, being a small team of 8 members, some of whom work part-time. Currently, the average cost of the tutoring program is of 0.82 USD per month per student. These strategies make our program low-cost and easily scalable while at the same time maintaining a personalized and meaningful experience for all people involved.

4) We plan to use the mentioned advantages to develop measures of civic agency that will inform our actions. 

5) Implementation, out intervention is innovative in that it combines two tools Scratch and guided discussions using “The little prince” together these will help children develop a sense of agency.  

For the following year, we want to implement a program by applying two combined strategies (The Little Prince and Scratch) to answer the following research questions:

1. What is the best way to effectively measure civic agency?

2. How does this strategy promote civic agency?

3. To what extent does this strategy promote civic agency?

To answer these questions we are going to implement a series of quantitative and qualitative surveys where we can measure the impact of the treatments on the following outcomes:

• Increased self-empowerment, self-confidence and self-perception

• Development of critical thinking. That is, if the capacity for reflection has increased and, with it, their capacity to solve problems effectively.

• Better socio-emotional skills. That is, if the child is able to express himself, receive feedback and belong to a community.

Regarding civic agency we want to impact children in a way that allows them to see themselves as historic agents. This means that our students will become aware of the impact they can have in society, and of the fact that they can reshape society. While at the moment this impact has no clear KPI, we intend to test existing metrics and try new ones that can shed light on whether the impact is being achieved. 

Regarding the numbers in the program, we would like to keep sustained growth of 20% each year within Mexico. This means that by 2028 we could be impacting 20k children anually. Moreover, we would like to expand to at least 3 different countries in Latin America, to keep the time zones close. This would give the children to meet other children in their continent, and share more learning experiences. We would like to have at least 3k children in those 3 countries. The first expansion we would like to test in Chile next year (2024), and in 2026 we could try two more expansions by partnering with local organizations in two different countries.

All our participants are required to answer baseline and endline surveys on a mandatory basis. These are used to measure our innovation's performance as well as the research area and RCT's. Children take the tests and surveys both before and after each cycle with a tutor which we can see their retention of knowledge and learning of the topics. At the same time, the tutor carries out a series of mandatory training as a requirement before we assign him/her to the groups. Both children (or parents) and tutors also answer a demographic survey so we can learn about the socioeconomic context of the participants. Similarly, the tutor must fill out a weekly attendance report and upload the audio recordings of their classes. In the end, both parents and tutors answer satisfaction and opinion surveys in which they share their complaints, suggestions, and congratulations regarding the program. Another important outcome will be the features we will extract from the recordings of the audio of tutoring sessions. 

Therefore, we can come up with the next KPIs on a regular basis and make evidence-based decisions and adjust our future strategies accordingly.

To monitor the coverage and scalability of the program over time:

1. Math scores before and after the lessons and by gender

2. Number of tutors and students enrolled

3. Performance of participants on surveys to be implemented regarding awareness and agency in their environments.

4. Attendance rate among students and tutors

5. Satisfaction rate of students, tutors and parents

6. Re-enrollment rate for students

7. Number of states covered 

8. Number of universities covered

9. Number of agreements

Regarding the community agency program pilot, part of our goals is to understand better how to measure civic action after our interventions.We plan to launch diverse qualitative and quantitative surveys to better understand the impact of the new curriculum on our participants.

We are piloting this intervention on a smaller scale during the summer of 2023 with tutors from Tecnológico de Monterrey University. This way, we will develop the necessary measuring instruments that we will implement for the project we are referring to in this application.

Tutors

Activity:We will recruit, interview and train university students. 

Output: The goal is to have trained tutors who will implement the interventions. 

Short-term outcome: We will see children learn and perform the material. 

Long-term outcome: we will see students change their perception of their own civic agency. 

Reach

Activity: We will build relationships with schools and universities to advertise the program.

Output:  The goal is to increase the number of participants both tutors and students. 

Short-term outcome: We will have recognition from our partners 

Long-term outcome: We will be a recognised program with a foothold in all states of the country. 

Measurement

Activity: Develop instruments, questionnaires and nonstructured data analysis (recordings and text analysis) to measure sense of agency.

Output: 2 or 3 reliable and standardized instruments. 

Short-term outcome: Measure the impact of out own interventions. 

Long-term outcome: Provide a set of tools for future researchers, educators, and stakeholders to develop and test new interventions aimed at developing civic agency.  

Implementation 

Scratch

Activity: Teach children the scratch programming language and motivate them to do a project (game, story, animation) regarding a topic of their choice.

Outputs: Children present a project on something that they programed. They design the project themselves and later post it in the community so they can find children with similar interests, and learn from what others are doing

Short term outcomes. Children realize there is a place where they can make all the decisions, and where their voice will be reflected and expressed. 

Long-term outcomes: Children will realize that environments are the result of decisions, either explicit or implicit, either community build or decided by a few. They will also realize that they can influence many aspects of their community. 

The little prince

Activity: Children read chapters of the little prince in guided discussions with the tutors. They find what aspects of each story are similar to aspects of their own lives, the lives of the people close to them, and their communities. 

Outputs: A discussion where children question themes that intersect their lives, which could otherwise be taken for granted. 

Short-term outcomes: Children realize that rules, behavior, habits and costumes and not given, but have reasons behind them. Children can try to understand what lies behind them and see which reasons are consistent with their ethical values, and which are not. 

Long-term outcomes: Children can question what aspects of their communities and their own behavior are beneficial to others as well as themselves. They can question lack of equity and justice in their communities, think that there are ways to change it and feel a sense of agency to change some of these things themselves. 

At JANN we have developed a complete platform to offer the best quality of our services. (www.jann.mx) 

Since almost all processes are automated, the cost of the program is very low. Currently we are spending about 0.82 USD per month of classes per participant.

We are constantly developing and enhancing our platform by adding different functionalities to it and making them easy to use and monitor.

For example, on the platform we have uploaded many hours of mandatory and optional training for tutors as well as support material and exercises on all topics. We have also develop different bots that help us answer FAQs to our users.

Beyond the platform we developed a system that allows us to coordinate thousands of tutors and thousands of students. For instance tutors need to enroll, complete their mandatory training and attend an interview before being assigned to their students. Once assigned we have a monitoring system that allows us to make sure that classes are being taught on time. Tutors upload a report of their classes as well as a recording of their class. They also need to maintain communication via the WhatsApp group and we have a program that allows us to verify that all of this is happening.

We have also recently developed a section for teachers to check up on their student’s assistance and tutoring results.

Additionally, we have stored all the databases with the results of previous interventions, plus more than 100,000 hours of recordings for which participants have granted consent for us to analyze. We are using NLP and audio processing on the recordings of the classes to understand better what teaching styles are more successful. This nonstructured information can be used to develop new tools to measure agency at a large scale. 

More importantly, our tutoring platform, JANN, serves as the perfect controlled environment where the composition of groups, the student-tutor match, and the training and instructions to the tutors are completely adjustable to answer all kinds of questions. Plus, the large scale of the platform assures that our findings are easily replicable, as most instructions are done through videos. 

The internet-based nature of the program allows us the possibility to be easily scaled up, allowing us to screen more participants and reach more remote areas all over México.

As we mentioned earlier, our participants register from 16 different states of the republic. Also, more than half of the students are in the bottom two quintiles of the income distribution (self-reported). About 40% of them don't have any family members that went to university, 60% don't own a computer and about 20% of them do not have access to wifi. That is, many come from low income families. Our tutors come from public universities as well as high and low budget private universities.We strive to make JANN an inclusive community where everyone can find a space to express themselves and respect is key to us. 

We randomly assign students from different socio-economic, ratial and geographical backgrounds in the same group. In this way, each group can benefit from the diversity and uniqueness that each member brings to the class.

Each group consists of 5 students per tutor and meetings are held twice a week for 5 weeks, which guarantees personalized attention and consistency. These characteristics create an environment and inclusiveness where students can feel welcome, respected, supported and valued.

This program also seeks to offer equal opportunities to all children regardless of their place and circumstance of birth. We believe that under the right environment and guidance, you have the same capabilities to improve yourself and become a change agent in your community.

On the side of the organizing team, 5 out of the 8 members are women we all come from different socio-economic backgrounds and live in different cities across the country. Tizayuca, Queretaro and Mexico City. 

Key resources: 

• www.jann.mx 

• guided discussion training modules

• scratch and scratch training modules

• human resources team to support tutors

• donor network and grants

• instruments to measure civic agency

Partners + Key Stakeholders

• States who advertise program among teachers, students and parents:

  • Aguascalientes

  • Baja California

  • Puebla

  • Estado de Mexico

  • Sinaloa

  • Durango

  • Yucatan

• Universities that provide tutors:

  • UNITEC 

  • ITESM 

  • UVM 

  • UNAM

  • ITAM 

  • Escuela Bancaria y Comercial

  • UDLAP

• Legal (pro bono lawyers)

  • Galicia 

• Organization partner in implementation

  • Proeducacion IAP

• Donors

Key activities 

• enroll and train tutors

• enroll and survey children

• coordinate tutors and students

• monitor tutor activity

• support tutors answer questions and concerns

• secure funding 

• measure civic agency 

Segments

• Children in primary and middle schools in Mexico

• Families 

• Math teachers in primary and middle schools

• University students in Mexico 

Value proposition

• Developing children’s sense of civic agency

• Impact measures:

  • # of students

  • # of tutors

  • student led projects

  • # of hours of class taught 

Channels:

• We are reaching potential tutors through forming partnerships with universities and attending university events

• We  reach parents, teachers and students through information sessions hosted by our partners, the  state governments. 

• We reach out to potential donors through chambers of commerce. 

Cost structure: 

• Staff

• Server AWS

• SMS/ WhatsApp communication

• Survey platform

• Video and other media

Surplus

• Further platform development

• increase number of active users 

• developing strategy for sustainable funding

Revenue

• Implementation and research grants

• Donations 

type of intervention 

• education intervention to develop a sense of civic agency in children

• measurement of civic agency

Our main advantage related to cost efficiency is that tutors are not paid professionals, but rather volunteers or university students fulfilling a social service requirement. This allows us to keep the program's costs low, with expenses limited to organizing staff salaries, participant messaging, and server hosting. Thanks to our platform that automates most of the process (training, surveying, monitoring), we've been able to coordinate many students and tutors with a team of just 12 people, costing us on average 0.82 US cents per month per child in 2022.

Our sustainable financing model is being designed together with the expert advice of “Procura” and the legal advice of “Galicia Associates”. We are also looking to employ an expert in fundraising to work for us permanently.

 Our medium-term revenue model consists of 30% public income and 70% private income coming from donations and prizes. For the first part, we plan on having the state governments pay for part of our services. In the medium term we seek to have a base of recurring donors both in Mexico and the United States, as well as other alternative funding sources such as prizes and foundations such as: Inter-American foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, USAID and The UNESCO Prize for Girls' and Women's Education. 

We also decided to expand our possibilities and look for donors also in the United States. For this, we have obtained a sponsor that supports us with the legal and administrative part of the funds in that country (CAF America). Therefore, we will soon be launching a funding campaign with the Georgia and Texas Chamber of Hispanic Business Owners. At the same time, we are applying to receive a cost-effectiveness analysis from “Give Well”, which will help us provide certainty about the correct use of the funds received.

For the long term, we want to scale up the program enough to rely on 100% public funding by charging governments to give their children access to the tutoring program. 

Additionally, we can open our program to children of other countries in Latin America. The first one we plan to include is Chile because of relations we have with educational institutions in that country.  

By opening the program to Chilean children, we would charge a monthly fee to the ministries of Education of different provinces in the country. In 2003, Chile spent 526 usd per student in basic education per year. We would try to charge 2 usd per student which would be enough to cover the program costs. 2 usd per student represents about 0.3% percent of the expenditure per student, and having this extra 2 hours with a group and tutor would increase the teaching time for students in 6%, making it highly efficient. As the program would grow, opportunities for economies of scale would arise, making it possible to reduce the cost to 50 cents or less per students per month with sustained growth.  

Since its beginning, JANN has operated mainly with research grants. We have received the following: 

$40,000 USD from the J-WEL grant in pK-12 Education Innovation (2022), close to $50,000 USD from The Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics (2022), $42,000 USD from PPE Initiative Pilot Grant JPAL (2021) and about $22,000 USD from Shultz Fund at MIT (2021 and 2022). We have also received $10,000 USD from mexican private donations through an intermediary called PYMO. At the moment we are closing two donations from American companies, the amount is still to be determined.