Building Scalable Model for Personalized Learning in Indian Public Schools

Despite increased school enrollment, improved infrastructure, and better nutrition, learning outcomes among children in India remain poor, and socio-economically disadvantaged public school students lag behind expected grade-level competencies. This lag leads to gaps in learning levels within classrooms, creating a challenge for teachers to meet all students' needs. As learning gaps worsen over time, students falling behind their peers tend to drop out of school. To enable individualized instruction in classrooms with limited resources, education technology company Educational Initiatives (Ei) developed Mindspark, a personal adaptive learning (PAL) software that identifies individual student learning levels in math, the predominant local language, and English through diagnostic tests. It then provides targeted instruction to help students learn at a level and pace most appropriate for them. Mindspark is one of only a few rigorously-tested PAL software programs in India and has demonstrated significant and cost-effective learning gains in independent evaluations, including a randomized controlled trial. Mindspark has been used by 500,000 students and is available in nine languages on tablets, laptops, and computers. With support from the DIV Fund, Ei will make Mindspark accessible to students in public schools, reaching over 40,000 students and 1,000 teachers across more than 200 government day schools, as well as develop a new foundational literacy and numeracy app that will enable greater reach. Ei will also undertake A/B testing of different implementation strategies to identify best practices and develop a blueprint for scaling PAL in resource constrained environments. The project will build upon investments by state governments, positioning Ei to scale Mindspark across at least 5,000 government schools in India, as well as enable the Ei team to work towards international expansion in the coming years.