Relevance of community-defined social-emotional learning competencies for a national EdTech program scale-up in Malawi

• In Event: Overcoming Barriers and Navigating Processes: Expanding Technology Use in Education

Proposal

Education technology (EdTech) programs have been widely established as one of the most effective education interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa (Conn 2017; McEwan 2015; Damon et al., 2016; Rodriguez-Segura 2020). The Malawi Ministry of Education launched the Building Education Foundations through Innovation & Technology (BEFIT) program, a national scale-up of a foundational educational solution (using onebillion’s adaptive software in Chichewa) to all primary school children in Malawi beginning in September 2023. This was in response to learning poverty which currently is at 87%. Moreover most students, whether or not they complete the first few years of primary school, are not becoming fluent readers. The BEFIT program delivers supplemental instruction through a tablet-based curriculum during dedicated periods in the school timetable (targeting a minimum of 150 minutes per week). The tablets are rotated among classrooms so that all children in grades 1-4 use the tablets daily. This “adaptive” software provides early grade instruction that is personalised to meet the proficiency level of each child.

Over the past decade, multiple rigorous studies of onebillion’s tablet-based software have consistently shown positive and significant learning impacts in literacy and numeracy across learning settings, languages, and countries (King et al., 2019, Levesque et al., 2020, 2022; Pitchford et al., 2017). Further, a recent exploratory study conducted by Bardack and colleagues (2023) examining divergent patterns in children’s reading progressions at a peri-urban Malawi primary school showed that children’s working memory skills emerged as the strongest, unique predictor of high versus low progress in reading while controlling for other factors (i.e., age and HLLE). As the BEFIT program scales nation-wide, more research is needed to better understand how a wider range of social-emotional learning (SEL) skills may support children’s educational progress in tablet-based curriculum interventions in a developing context.

While there is robust evidence linking children’s SEL skills to their academic achievement (Durlak et al., 2018; Jones et al., 2021; Mulcahy-Dunn et al., 2018), most theoretical and empirical research related to SEL processes has been conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) contexts. Thus, there are few localized, culturally appropriate data collection instruments (e.g., interviews, questionnaires) that could be used to (1) identify which SEL competencies that local communities view as important for children’s academic development; and (2) better understand how these competencies support children’s learning in non-Western countries (Jukes et al, 2018; Jukes et al, 2021; Mulcahy-Dunn et al., 2018).

The current study builds on prior research conducted as part of a qualitative investigation of local perceptions of SEL constructs in rural Tanzania, which was then used to develop a questionnaire to collect adult reports on community-defined SEL (CSEL) competencies (Jukes et al., 2021). Our study replicates this approach with the goal of developing a localized, culturally appropriate tool to measure the SEL skills that are most relevant to support learning during a tablet-based curriculum program for school-aged children in Malawi. Using a mixed method approach, the current study aims to: (1) identify SEL competencies that parents and teachers perceive to be important for the tablet-based curriculum program; and (2) develop a questionnaire that can be administered and refined during BEFIT to understand how perceived changes in these community-defined SEL competencies may relate to children’s experiences and academic achievement in the tablet-based curriculum program.

To identify community-defined SEL competencies, we conducted semi-structured interviews with adult stakeholders at two rural government primary schools that were participating in the nationwide scale-up of the BEFIT program in Malawi. The sample comprised 20 respondents, including 2 head teachers, 6 class teachers, 11 parents and 1 BEFIT coordinator. These interviews explored the perspectives of local Malawi communities on the skills, behaviors, and mindsets that were most relevant to children’s experiences in the tablet program. Interviews were transcribed and translated into English then categorized and coded by both Imagine and University of Malawi researchers. We created labels and definitions (in English and Chichewa) for each competency using a framework developed by the Harvard EASEL Lab’s Taxonomy Project that analyzed SEL constructs across 43 frameworks to understand how locally identified SEL constructs overlapped or differed from those in frameworks developed by external stakeholders. Our coding process included a thematic analysis in which interview responses were reviewed and categorized into competencies (i.e. an overarching theme around an SEL quality mentioned) and then grouped into categories with similar competencies. Based on these results, we conducted a frequency analysis to identify the competencies mentioned by the greatest number of respondents.

The most frequently mentioned categories of the qualities that would make children successful in the tablet program included cognitive regulation, values, interpersonal processes and identity/self-image. Within each category, the following competencies were cited as the two most important for the tablet program: (1) attentive and memory for the cognitive regulation category, (2) careful and engaged for the values category; (3) obedient and respectful for the interpersonal processes category; (4) independent and motivated for the identity/self-image category. These results informed the development of a parent questionnaire that was piloted and cognitive tested on a small sample of parents (9) at one of the study schools.

We will present the full results from our analysis of the CSEL stakeholder interview, as well as reliability and descriptive statistics from the pilot test of the CSEL parent questionnaire at the CIES 2025 conference. Given the BEFIT program’s potential to boost literacy and numeracy skills in Malawi, the current study will shed important light on the behavioral and cognitive skills that may support children’s progress in the tablet-based curriculum, which in turn may relate to their literacy and numeracy achievement gains. Further, this work will contribute to the development of localized, culturally appropriate instruments that can be used to collect data on a wide range of SEL related skills during implementations at scale as the BEFIT program rolls out nationally in Malawi.

Authors

• Sarah Bardack, Imagine Worldwide

• Celeste Lopez, Imagine Worlwide

• Karen Levesque, Imagine Worldwide