Carvajal Foundation

Design and implement innovative social methodologies in Valle del Cauca and the northern section of Cauca, which contribute to improving the educational conditions of the home, income generation and the development of being. Our methodologies have high social impact, transfer potential and scalability at national and international level.

The team leader for the LEAP project, Marta Tulcán, holds the position of Primary Education Specialist, where she supervises the technical execution of the programs in the primary education line, monitoring the fulfillment of activities in relation to the established indicators and products. She is also in charge, together with the MEL team, of the design of instruments, indicators and evaluations required as a baseline in the process of measuring and monitoring projects in the early childhood line.

From January 2024 the team will be dedicated to the development of the initial testing of the Aula Global by Interactive Audio Instruction prototype. While the area has other areas of focus, there are several strategies that we are considering implementing to effectively support the LEAP project.

1. Establish clear priorities: The team has clear priorities for the LEAP project and team members are aligned on what is expected of them and how priorities arising from other areas of the Foundation should be handled. This includes defining clear objectives and realistic timelines for all activities.

2. Transparent communication: The team knows the importance of communicating transparently and frequently with other areas or teams in the Foundation to ensure that everyone is aligned against priorities, to avoid any situation that could affect the project.

3. Adaptability and flexibility: The team is adaptable and flexible, allowing them to face the challenges of participating in the LEAP project, without neglecting the other activities that are carried out at the Foundation at the same time.

4. Focus on problem solving: The team focuses on problem solving to overcome any obstacles that may affect the development of activities, including those that may arise due to other objectives within the Foundation.

Finally, we have the support of the Foundation's directors in training and strengthening activities for both the work teams and the organization's programs, which allows us to effectively guarantee the implementation of the LEAP project.

Strengthen competencies and skills in language and mathematics for students from 2nd to 5th grade who are lagging in school.

Aula Global is a program aimed at solving the country's learning poverty by closing the basic learning gaps in language and mathematics in elementary school students in Colombia's public schools. 

In the country, 5 out of 10 children of reading comprehension age do not really understand what they read. In some cities this number rises to 7, especially in the most vulnerable schools. According to the World Bank, not being able to read and understand a short text appropriate for the age of 10 means being in learning poverty. A child in learning poverty is 4 times less likely to graduate from high school. If the same child lives in poverty, he or she is 13 times less likely to graduate.

This situation calls for innovation in educational processes and shows that it is necessary to implement basic learning recovery programs that:

- Allow students to continue and satisfactorily complete their educational trajectory.

- Are easy to use, replicate and scale, considering the new realities of generalized learning loss.

- Take into account mobility and other conditions of vulnerable populations such as migrants.

Although Aula Global has proven success in closing basic learning gaps, since its inception in 2017, the current situation of learning losses during the pandemic and the migratory context brings new challenges that invite innovation and transformation so that its contents can be more easily scalable, replicable and lower cost, so that they can be extended to populations that do not have access to the program because their school does not have it or even to unschooled population and/or on the move. In this sense, we seek to incorporate Interactive Audio Instruction (IAI) to give greater scalability and replicability to the program, covering and benefiting a greater number of children.

IAI is a learning system that combines an auditory medium and active learning pedagogy to improve the quality of education. According to the Education Development Center (EDC), this system is based on the theory that students learn best when instruction reaches them through a variety of strategies or channels (multichannel learning) because it ensures that students are exposed to diverse forms of learning. In this system, audio content guides the teacher/facilitator and students through activities, songs, games, and exercises that teach a particular topic or lesson.

The participatory nature of audio-guided lessons engages students in multiple ways: cognitively, physically, emotionally, creatively, and socially (World Bank Group and EDC, 2015).

The aim is to strengthen Aula Global as a basic learning recovery program, through the incorporation of IAI, in order to increase its effect, facilitate its scalability and sustainability and continue strengthening children's learning. IAI is a learning system that combines an auditory medium and active learning pedagogy. IAI enhances learning through multi-channel exposure to learning, enjoyable and effective teaching, and the opportunity to engage different discursive forms. Additionally, as pre-recorded lessons, this system allows for continuous use for post-class reinforcement, home use, additional educational support and even bringing quality instruction to remote access areas and moving/migrating populations, thus promoting equitable access to quality education.

Audio content is delivered via MP3or cell phones and with the help of the group's teacher or a mediator, who receives instructions from the audio to implement active, student-centered instruction. In turn, teachers and students participate by responding to the audio instructions during the built-in pauses, even allowing both students and teachers to enhance their learning.

The program is primarily developed in three phases:

1.The characterization phase is related to the collection of information, targeting students for tutoring, application of tests and analysis of information. On the one hand, students are characterized through the application of the EGRA and EGMA diagnostic tests, internationally validated to obtain information related to student performance in basic skills in the areas of language and mathematics. On the other hand, the characterization of teaching practices is done through the application of a survey type instrument, which provides information on the knowledge that teachers have about the program, methodological strategies used for the teaching of these two areas of knowledge, the use of ICT for language and mathematics classes.

2.The intervention phase is carried out especially in three ways: tutoring with students, group meetings with teachers and meetings with families.

Tutorials with students are held twice a week, during the school day, in language and mathematics, with those who are lagging behind. For this, students are given a printed guide(booklet) containing the complete material for the tutorials that were developed throughout the intervention, which includes templates and texts from children's and young people's literature.

The accompaniment to the teachers is led by the pedagogical advisors, who share the work material with the teachers, seeking to develop and strengthen the appropriation of different strategies for the teaching and learning of language and mathematics. It is expected that this advice to teachers will have a positive impact on all students, including those who were not direct participants in the program, but who will be positively impacted by the improvement of the teacher's practices.

The work with families is done through socioemotional workshops, tools for good parenting and home study strategies, which results in a comprehensive accompaniment that benefits children.

3.After the culmination of the intervention process, the EGRA and EGMA tests are carried out again, with the purpose of knowing the results of the implementation of the project in the children, applied to all children, whether or not they have been direct participants.

For Aula Global program, in 2017, Harvard University, led by Felipe Barrera and Francisco Lagos, conducted the impact evaluation of the first implementation of the program carried out in 2017. The objective was to analyze the individual and combined effectiveness of two interventions - teacher professional development and individual tutoring - on the learning outcomes of students with learning difficulties.

Likewise, in each implementation, an entrance and an exit test is performed to determine the difference between the performances obtained by students who are part of the program and those who are not. In this order, there are implementation results for the execution of the program between the years 2018 to 2022, where, in general, there is evidence of progress in the competencies evaluated in both EGMA and EGRA in the intervened institutions.

However, it is important to highlight that the base proposal presented in this call is Aula Global by IAI modality, which has not been implemented and therefore, there are no evaluations of any kind.

The impact evaluation report conducted Enel 2017, asserts that test results at the end of the academic year show that, while on average students in all schools and in all grades improve their performance compared to their baseline scores, students who participated in the mentoring intervention outperform their peers in the control group. On average, students in the tutoring intervention perform 0.13 SD higher than comparable students in the control schools. This positive and statistically significant effect increases as students participate in more tutoring sessions. There is a large variability in the number of tutoring sessions attended by treated students, resulting in differences in test scores at the end of the year: for a student who attended 22 sessions, the effect is 0.26 SD; for a student participating in 32 sessions, the effect of the tutoring program is 0.38 SD. These effects are positive even considering that the number of observations is relatively low, and that this was the first time this intervention was implemented.

In this sense, the main evaluation instruments are the EGMA and EGRA tests, which allow measuring the changes of the children before and after the implementation of the program, having identified the control group and the treatment group.

As a result of the implementation in 2020, in the EGMA tests, the comparison of the results between baseline and exit line show that the concentration of students in the Upper Level increased by 5 percentage points (pp). It is also important to mention that the concentration of students at the Adequate level increased by 13 percentage points (pp), from 41.3% to 55.1%. In contrast, when analyzing the Low Level, which concentrates the lowest scores, it is observed that the number of students at the starting line decreases by more than 3 pp. The same occurs at the Basic level, where the most pronounced decrease of more than 15 pp is seen, dropping from 49.3% to 33.7% of students evaluated.

With respect to the EGRA tests, the comparison of the results between the baseline and the exit line shows that the concentration of students in the Higher Level also increased, in this case the change was more than 7 pp. It is also important to mention that the concentration of students in the Adequate Level increased by approximately 11 pp, the largest increase of all levels, going from 24.2% to 35.8%. In contrast, when analyzing the Low Level, which concentrates the lowest scores, it is observed that the number of students concentrated in this level decreased by approximately 4 pp in the starting line. The same occurs at the Basic level, where the most pronounced decrease of more than 14 pp is seen, going from 49.7% to 35.1%.

Although Aula Global has proven success in closing basic learning gaps, the realities of the Colombian educational landscape call for ongoing innovation to achieve strategies that are easy to use, replicate and scale. In this sense, the present proposal aims to enhance Aula Global as a basic learning recovery program, through the incorporation of Interactive Audio Instruction, in order to increase its effect, facilitate its scalability and sustainability and continue strengthening children's learning. It is proposed to start with a pilot exercise, in which the materials and the interactive audio instruction scheme in basic competencies will be developed, produced and tested in the city of Cali, Colombia, for its subsequent implementation and replication in different territories.

In this sense, one of the most important challenges we have in the Foundation is precisely to have evidence in the application of this modality in Aula Global program, to strengthen and implement it through this innovative idea that will allow us to reach more children in different contexts of the country.

1. How can the effectiveness of interactive audio instruction be evaluated in different educational contexts?

2. How does Audio Interactive instruction close learning gaps in basic competencies?

3. Is Audio Interactive instruction viable for the improvement of basic competencies of children outside the educational system?

The main outcome of the sprint is the design of an impact evaluation that can be implemented in out-of-school contexts and with people in migration processes.

We selected the three types of research/studies, given that in the case of Aula Global program in the IAI modality, we do not have any evidence that proves its impact or effect. In this sense, it is important to have as much information, study and analysis of its operation as possible.

The findings and results of this project will be incorporated into the methodology and practice of the program and the results will be used to adjust the intervention and then implement it on a larger scale.

It is important to mention that all the material of our Aula Global program, such as primers and audios, are in Spanish.

1. Design of an impact evaluation that can be implemented in out-of-school contexts and with people in migration processes.

2. Aula Global by IAI, a scalable and replicable learning recovery program in different territories and with diverse populations.