Just Commit Foundation

Vision: To leverage innovation to ensure the development of children and youth. 

Mission: To provide educational resources to improve the development of children and youth. 

As the Team Lead, I am responsible for:

1. Leading the day to day activities.

2. Planning projects for our programme.

3. Organizing and coordinating staff and resources.

The Team Lead and supporting staff has over five years of experience when it comes to commitment for partnership with International Organizations in programmes such as the Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI),  UNESCO Literacy Prize 2020, World Bank Group's Y2Y Climate Smart Entrepreneurship Competion 2021, Crew4All Platform and more.

Therefore, the Team Lead and the organization’s senior level staff can commit 2-4 hours of work per week over the course of the 12-week LEAP Project sprint.

We offer story books and text-to-speech apps to educate, monitor and meet literacy needs of variable students aged 9-12.

Based on our interaction with teachers and students of urban poor schools, it was revealed that inadequate number of teachers and inadequate number of trained teachers make it difficult to implement learning variability solutions to meet the meet the varied needs of children facing problem with reading and comprehension.

Extra Problem Details:

2019 Report from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) reveals that 7.9 million persons aged 6 years and older in Ghana are illiterate since they cannot read and write with understanding. 

According to the world bank group, the student to teacher ratio in Ghana was 27:1 in 2019. Out of these teachers, only 67% of primary school teachers are trained.  The UK government recently imposed a ban on Ghana to prevent immigration of more teachers to U.K.

These factors reduces the quality and numbers of teachers who are capable to implement learning variability solutions especially for children aged 2-12. So there is the need for innovative technology solutions to complement the numbers, the quality and the efforts of the teachers to help students to meet te variability needs to learn how to read, write and spell and improve their literacy skills.

We embrace learning variability that considers (1) within-person variability, (2) within-group variability, (3) variability across contexts, (4) designing for scale, and (5) data and methods

Therefore we offer many varied  educational resources such as an e-learning platform, tablets, story apps, e-books and hardcopy print books to meet the varied needs of students. 

For example urban poor students are given access to the hardcopy story books at low cost and can have access to all other resources for free. 

However, we focus on monitoring, collecting and evaluating data on our variability solution on the reading and comprehension skills of students through our e-learning platform and print books for our evidence based solution. 

We conduct the following research:

1. Foundational research of literature reviews. 

2. Formative research using usability studies. Formative assessment is done using multiple choice, fill-in and simple statement questions and answers at the end of story chapters.

Summative Assessment is done by collating the formative assessments.

1. Foundational research of literature reviews revealed the following: 

A. Learner variability accepts that all learners differ and that these differences matter for learning (Pape, 2018)

B. Simon Sommer, Co-CEO of the Jacobs Foundations research (https://jacobsfoundation.org/l...) 

recommends the following practices we we have put in place: 

i. Synchronous or asynchronous models through the use of our e-learning platform and story apps. 

ii. Finding zone of proximal development where teachers guide students in th use of our technologies.

iii. Striving towards teaching skills such as creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking through the business story lessons. 

iv. Use of technology such as e-learning platform, story apps and text to speech functios to automate activities and assessment to give the tutor extra time for individual variability correction.

C. Our Text-to-speech audio supports have also been Shown to be particularly helpful for students Who have poorer reading comprehension (Disseldorp & Chambers, 2002). These findings Suggest that audio can support a variety of Learners in many of the key areas of reading Success including vocabulary development, Engagement, and reading fluency.

D. Our e-books and story apps offer zoom function which offers Larger text and has been shown to increase Reading fluency for younger children and some Children with dyslexia (O’Brien et al., 2005), 

2. Formative research using usability studies. Formative assessment is done using multiple choice, fill-in and simple statement questions and answers at the end of story chapters.

Summative Assessment is done by collating the formative assessments.

Summative assessment of print books has reveled an average of  70% score. 

The programme is being implemented. Therefore, our organization needs to strengthen the monitoring and evaluation needs of the evidence base of our varied solutions offering story apps, print books, e-books and the e-learning platform for varied student needs. 

Therefore this is now is the right time to engage in a LEAP Project to benefit from access to a worldwide pool of research, knowledge, skills, resources and networks to support our education solution’s evidence programme.

1. What are the learning variabilities of students aged 9-12 years?  

2. What are the zones of proximal development of students aged 9-12?

3. At what extent does the text-to-speech function and print story books address the learning variability of students aged 9-12 years in terms of reading, writing and spelling skills?

Within the required time frame of three months, the diverse fellows and diverse projects involved, the collated foundational research such as background literature review is much plausible as the desired research output.

The foundational research such as literature review can serve as background for further formative and summative research of our programmes.

The short term outcome of the LEAP Project to my organization and solution is that the LEAP project will offer improvements for effective monitoring and evaluation of our evidence based solution. 

The long term outcome of the LEAP Project to our organization and project is that knowledge from the project will help us to effectively address the learning variability of 1,000 students aged 9-12 years in terms of reading, writing and spelling skills yearly.