IT PROFESSIONAL PRESIDENT'S AWARDS 2022 - SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY/COMMUNITY AWARD NOMINATION

Name of Nominee: Siyavula Education

Background:

Siyavula’s online practice platform, built by scientists, educational experts and teachers, aims to make high-quality education accessible to all learners. The platform is designed to work on any device - even old feature phones - that can access the internet. And because our website is zero-rated on all major network providers in South Africa, learning is accessible anywhere, anytime. Learners sign up on the platform and can then choose to practise Mathematics (Grade 8 - 12) or Physical Sciences (Grade 10 - 12). The platform contains virtually unlimited questions, with an algorithm that adjusts the difficulty level of questions to the learner’s level of understanding. This allows learners to progress at their own rate. Learners receive immediate feedback on the questions they do, and each question comes with a step-by-step solution. This means that errors and misconceptions are corrected in real time. Since its inception in South Africa in 2012, learners have answered more than 100 million questions on the platform.

This project:

In collaboration with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) and the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE), Siyavula deployed its technology to high schools in Gauteng through a teacher-advisor led model. The four year project began in 2019.

The main objectives of the project were to:

Get teachers to drive the use of the Siyavula platform in order to help their learners improve their Mathematics and Physical Sciences results; and

Get GDE subject advisors to use the Siyavula reporting dashboard to check the activity of the schools in their districts

The project tested different deployment strategies with various levels of support delivered to teachers and subject advisors.

Teachers in the project have immediate access to detailed reports, which show learner performance on different topics. The reports can be used to diagnose problems, and remediate.

Provincial officials and subject specialists had access to district level dashboards and reports which enabled them to monitor and track the use, engagement and performance of the schools in their district.

Support and training was provided to teachers and subject advisors through face to face visits, training sessions, online webinars and over WhatsApp. The Siyavula ICT coaches were supported by The Flying Cows of Jozi, a consultancy specializing in the coaching of teachers to integrate digital skills into their teaching.

Siyavula developed a “Change in mastery” model to measure learning gains on the platform. They measured the initial mastery of a learner at the time when they start to get their first few questions correct, and the final mastery when they stop practising a chapter or section. We can then look at the overall difference between initial and final mastery. The graph below provides a snapshot of the improvements in 2020 by all the schools in the project.

We can gain the following insights from the above change in mastery plot which compares usage categories:

• As learners do more questions, the growth in mastery tends to increase.
• Learners in higher usage categories also cover a greater range of the content (higher percentage chapter coverage).
• Learners who did between 250 and 399 questions had a healthy change in mastery (21%) across a fair range of content (51% of the material).
• Learners who did above 1,000 questions had a very significant change in mastery (36%) across an impressive range of content (88% of the material).
• Even learners who did a small number of questions on Siyavula Practice did experience a positive change in mastery (6% for learners doing fewer than 50 questions), but this positive change in mastery is restricted to a small fraction of the content for their grade (9% of chapters on average for the lowest usage category). However, the significance of this result must be held up against the fact that, by definition, change in mastery will never be negative.

Learners who did more questions experienced correspondingly larger increases in mastery on the system. This pattern was robust across schools of all support types (including unsupported schools) as well as across years (data from 2020, despite being impacted by COVID-19 shows a nearly identical trend to that of 2019).

Learners in the project who achieve at least 50% mastery on Siyavula’s platform receive certificates as recognition, and we give learners small monthly prizes based on their positions on their class leaderboards. Learners in the project also take part in our national #HeadSTARt and #1MillionMaths challenges, which offer rewards and recognition for mastery on our platform.

Over the four years the project has seen substantial growth. Between January and August of 2022 the project supported 114,000 high school students and 3,400 teachers representing 830 Gauteng schools used the adaptive practice software. In the same period Siyavula delivered and marked more than 12,000,000 online mathematics and science questions for Gauteng students to support their learning.

Using Siyavula’s Digital Mathematics and Science platform: A story of hope

Nestled in the bustling township of Mamelodi, north-east of Pretoria, is Stanza Bopape Secondary School. This is one of 113 schools that was selected by the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) to benefit from Siyavula’s digital Mathematics and Science Practice project, in partnership with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

Like so many township schools, Stanza Bopape Secondary School does not have sophisticated infrastructure. However, the school is blessed with dedicated teachers who look beyond the immediate limitations and make a plan with what they have.

When the project was launched, teachers were trained on how to integrate Siyavula’s digital platform into teaching and learning. The fruits of this labour were not immediately obvious. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the teachers quickly realised they would have to adapt their way of teaching, and that they needed a new way of interacting with learners. Led by the HOD for Mathematics, Mrs Thandeka Ngwenya, teachers started using Siyavula’s assignment-setting feature to send homework to learners. They also assigned work from Siyavula’s question bank to test how well learners had understood the content they had been taught.

In response to COVID-19, strict lockdown measures and rotational attendance meant that teachers did not have any face-to-face contact with their learners, but Siyavula enabled them to continue teaching and sending work to learners.

Now that learners are back at school full-time, teachers have continued using Siyavula because they see a measurable improvement between learners practising questions using the Siyavula platform and their performance in class. “Some learners were failing Mathematics and Science before using Siyavula. With consistent practice, some of them have increased their results dramatically” says Mrs Ngwenya.

Updated on: 12/09/2022