Skalo

Who (first and last name) is the Team Lead for your application and LEAP Project?

Luisa Vélez

Describe the role the Team Lead plays in your organization. [100-200 words recommended]

Her personal motivation stems from her child who has cerebral palsy, which led her to embark on two transformative endeavors. Firstly, she co-founded the Zero to Three Child Development Foundation a decade ago to provide early intervention support for children with developmental needs. Secondly, she started Skalo, an educational technology startup that utilizes technology to personalize strategies and accommodations for students.

Luisa developed Skalo’s algorithm and consolidated a team of experts in education and in technology to materialize her dream of a tool to help teachers teach every single student according to their needs. As the CEO, her key responsibilities include maintaining relationships with investors and shareholders, identifying and prioritizing strategies and alliances for growth. Luisa leads the team strategy and does the fundraising.

Explain how your Team Lead and supporting team members are well-positioned to effectively support the LEAP Project, given other priorities within your organization. [200-500 words - recommended]

Our team priority is to collect evidence to support the impact of Skalo as a technology tool to ease inclusion and learning diversity management inside a classroom. As a team, we have been collecting data that supports the current pilots in Colombia. We are actively collecting data to assess the impact of our platform on our users through surveys, focus groups, design thinking workshops, and interviews conducted by our operations team.

The LEAP Project will be the opportunity to create a case study to support Skalo’s impact on the teachers’ practice with the collected data and could allow us to create and evaluation toolkit to generate conclusions to better communicate its impact to government and allies to scale and increase funding. The team is well-positioned to support the LEAP Project through their focus on gathering and analyzing quality data and their constant conversation with users to learn about their needs. During the first two years of operation, the team has measured Skalo’s impact and yielded valuable insights. For example, we have discovered that 90% of teachers using Skalo find the platform's configurations useful and highly effective for students with difficulties. Additionally, Skalo reduces in 80% the time required for generating customized accommodation plans. These findings highlight the platform's relevance in the classroom.

In parallel, the CEO and Product Owner regularly conduct ideation workshops and focus groups with teachers from various disciplines. These sessions aim to identify opportunities for improvement and new functionalities that can be developed on the platform to enhance teaching and planning in classrooms with diverse learning needs.

At Skalo, we have always placed great importance on evidence as a crucial component of our improvement and innovation process for the platform. Our entire team engages in weekly experiments with users, allowing us to identify areas for improvement and drive innovation based on user needs. We are well-trained, familiar with the process, and fully aware of the importance of creating supportive spaces for LEAP projects within our organization. Given our dedication to research, experimentation, and continuous improvement, our Team Lead and supporting team members are well-positioned to effectively support the LEAP Project. Despite other priorities within our organization, we understand the significance of the LEAP Project and are committed to allocating the necessary resources, time, and expertise to ensure its success. The collective experience, skills, and dedication of our team enable us to effectively balance multiple priorities and deliver valuable outcomes for the LEAP Project while maintaining the progress of other initiatives within Skalo.

One-line solution summary: In 20 words or less, summarize your organization's product or program that is the focus of your LEAP Project.

Technology for teachers to ease learning diversity and inclusion management of students facing temporary or permanent educational barriers and vulnerability.

Define the problem that your solution seeks to solve. [200-500 words recommended]

In Latin America, the educational landscape faces significant challenges, with 50% of children and adolescents experiencing educational vulnerability, and a dropout rate of 37% among students (UNESCO). Educational vulnerability refers to the fragile situation that some students encounter, which hinders their participation, progress, and overall engagement in the classroom. Teachers are tasked with the complex responsibility of educating a diverse group of students, including those in situations of educational vulnerability, while also ensuring adapted and personalized teaching methods that enable all students to reach their maximum potential.

Skalo's technology primarily benefits teachers by providing personalized strategies and tools to support students facing academic vulnerability. These personalized strategies and tools enable teachers to deliver instructions in various formats, facilitate individual and group work, and encourage peer interaction. Additionally, Skalo allows teachers to establish clear goals for struggling students and monitor their progress based on the personalized strategies implemented. By utilizing Skalo, teachers enhance their ability to manage the diverse learning needs within the classroom, as they receive calculated strategies and adjustments tailored to each student's case.

Educational institutions see Skalo as a valuable resource for implementing personalized strategies that reinforce students facing temporary or permanent barriers to learning. Skalo serves as a centralized data center for students with academic vulnerability, enabling schools to manage student histories, track progress, make pedagogical decisions based on data, facilitate interactions with external therapists, handle legally required reports, and engage with families to build a collaborative support system around the student. With Skalo, teachers significantly reduce the time spent on generating individualized definitions and instructions for each student, decreasing the process from 8 hours to just 30 minutes.

By using Skalo, teachers can adapt their teaching methods to cater to each student's unique learning style, making the educational experience more flexible through the utilization of technology. This adaptability guarantees the participation, progress, and retention of every student within the education system.

Skalo's technology addresses the pressing challenges faced by Latin American classrooms, empowering teachers with personalized strategies, data-driven decision-making, and streamlined administrative tasks. By enhancing teacher effectiveness and improving support for students in educational vulnerability, Skalo strives to make a positive impact on the education landscape in Latin America.

Describe your solution and how it works in simple terms. [200-500 words recommended]

Skalo's technology supports teachers in calculating personalized strategies and tools to support students facing academic vulnerability.

The first step is taken by the student's family, through an assessment they indicate how the student is seen from their abilities, areas for improvement, what they like, what they do not like and the expectations of the family.

Then it is the teacher's turn, who makes a pedagogical assessment of the student, to find her strengths and areas of improvement, taking into account areas such as memory, emotional well-being, numerical reasoning, following standards, reading, among others. Once the information is completed, the Skalo algorithm analyzes the data of the family and the teacher, to identify opportunities for student improvement and thus suggest the objectives that may have the best results for each student, once these objectives are selected by the teacher, Skalo suggests a personalized adjustment plan with adjustments, tools and activities for the teacher to implement in the classroom and to obtain the maximum potential of each student.

Once the adjustment plan delivered by Skalo is being implemented in the classroom, the teacher periodically records the progress made with the student. The teacher will be able to evaluate how effective the adjustments they are applying have been based on the objectives that were raised with the student.

At the end of the follow-up, reports can be created that show the impact of the adjustment plan on the student.

Select the key characteristics of your target population. Select all that apply.

• Pre-primary age children (ages 2-5)
• Primary school children (ages 5-12)
• Persons with Disabilities

In which country or countries does your solution currently operate?

Colombia

Upload your solution's Theory of Change or Logic Model.

Where would you place your solution on Nesta's Standards of Evidence?

To date, what research/studies has your organization conducted that have helped demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution? [200-500 words recommended]

Our platform aims to simplify the work of teachers in the classroom by utilizing technology to customize strategies and adjustments for students with specific needs. This need was recognized by Skalo's founder during her time at the Zero to Three Foundation, (www.ceroatres.org) where she witnessed the pressing requirement for a more inclusive school system for students facing barriers to learning. To address this, she developed an Excel algorithm that worked collaboratively with teachers from low-income educational institutions to suggest necessary adjustments and strategies to support student participation in the classroom.

After analyzing the data and observing the impact of Skalo, the team realized that the platform not only benefited students with disabilities but also those with various learning barriers. Leveraging the existing algorithms, the team calculated adjustments for students dealing with challenges such as domestic violence, malnutrition, and lack of motivation. This algorithm was then transformed into software, and a pilot test was conducted in approximately 60 institutions, involving 500 students aged 2-18 from different socioeconomic backgrounds over the course of one year. 

To measure the effectiveness of the platform and determine its relevance in providing efficient support for struggling students, we conducted opening and closing surveys. The results were compelling, with 80% of teachers acknowledging that the adjustments suggested by the platform, tailored to each student's needs, had a positive impact when implemented.

During the first year of Skalo's inception, we engaged in focus group discussions with over 1,000 teachers to understand the difficulties and requirements they faced while managing classrooms with students of varying learning abilities.

The valuable feedback received from teachers emphasized the need for Skalo's improvement and its integration with the school curriculum. As a result, the new version of Skalo enables us to identify the learning processes that pose the greatest challenges for students and suggest alternative and clearer methods for teachers to impart knowledge, ensuring that students with learning barriers can acquire skills based on their specific needs. Throughout our research, 86% of teachers expressed their willingness to continue using Skalo.

Since last year, we have been collaborating with our partners, including United Way, Fundación Saldarriaga Concha, Fundación Barco, and Fundación Scarpetta, conducting 80 pilot programs in 11 cities across Colombia. This initiative has positively impacted approximately 2,760 students and 957 teachers. We continue to conduct pre- and post-pilot surveys and engage in constant exploration through workshops, focus groups, interviews, and meetings with teachers, educational institutions, and parents. These interactions allow us to enhance and innovate our platform based on the needs and feedback of our stakeholders.

What has the research/studies you have conducted revealed about your solution and how did it inform your work moving forward? [200-500 words recommended]

With the evidence collected through interviews, surveys, workshops, and focus groups, we have identified the need for teachers to utilize tools that enable them to establish clear goals with students who are facing difficulties. We were able to establish that technology has the potential to reduce learning differences, support teacher development, and improve the quality and relevance of learning. Building upon this foundation, we have formulated the following indicators that will allow us to measure the impact of Skalo:

• Percentage of improvement of a student when receiving adjustments in the following dimensions from the baseline of the pedagogical evaluation:

  • Executive functions

  • Self-seteem

  • Social interaction

  • Cognition

  • Autonomy

  • Fine and gross motor skills

  • Attention

  • Memory

  • Sensory perception

  • Verbal and non-verbal communication

  • Numerical reasoning

  • Reading

  • Writing

• Reduction of the time spent by the teacher during adjustment planning.

• Increase in the number of active teachers and students on the Skalo platform.

All the information collected has been compiled in a control panel that allows us to identify all the evidence easily, clearly, and graphically.

Describe your organization's need to strengthen the evidence base of your solution. [200-500 words recommended]

Since its foundation in 2021, our team has been always talking to teachers to improve our platform to fit their needs, but we don’t have an evaluation kit that could allow us to gather this qualitative data in a more standardized way. We need to strengthen the way we collect evidence so we can introduce impact measurement studies that could demonstrate the impact of technology to ease inclusion and learning diversity management inside the classroom. The evaluation toolkit would allow us to gather insightful data that could be used by post-doctoral students to write papers and cases that are useful for Skalo to apply to grants and scale.

What are 2-3 research questions that you would like your LEAP Project to help you answer? [100 words recommended]

What is the impact for the teachers of using technology to determine and monitor classroom strategies and accommodation plans for students facing learning barriers and inclusion?

What are the most impactful adaptations and strategies for students facing temporary or permanent learning barriers of the piloted population based on the different dimensions that are measured in a student in Skalo (executive functions, cognition, reading, writing, self-esteem, autonomy, sensory, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, social interaction, verbal, non-verbal), numerical reasoning)?

What could be a strong Theory of change model for Skalo to demonstrate the impact of technology in inclusion and learning diversity management?

What type of research/studies do you think will help answer your stated questions? Select all that apply.

• Summative research (e.g. correlational studies; quasi-experimental studies; randomized control studies)

Please elaborate on your selection above by describing your desired outputs of the 12-week LEAP Project sprint. [200 - 500 words recommended]

Our desire outputs are:

• An evaluation toolkit that will give us a pilot roadmap that could help us establish a base line and metrics throughout the pilots, so we can generate conclusions and communicate better with stakeholders.

• An index to determine the impact of using Skalo in the teacher’s daily practice.

• A better theory of change model

We need a combination of interviews and data analysis that could help us understand how teachers use the platform and their perspective. We need a deeper analysis of the data already collected by Skalo about the main barriers faced by the piloted students and determine the patterns according to the type of population analyzed.

It would be interesting to see a comparison in the data already collected by Skalo of the impact by adjustment in the different dimensions that are measured in a student (executive functions, cognition, reading, writing, self-esteem, autonomy, sensory, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, social interaction, verbal reasoning, non-verbal, numeric) to determine good practices for the management of learning diversity. Finally, with an evaluation tool we can establish how to interview teachers for the next cohort of users and establish a better process to collect significant data.

How will your organization put these outputs into action? [200-500 words recommended]

We will use the evaluation toolkit for the next user cohorts and we will improve our data lake and analytics. The digital Q&A will help us better communicate with teachers to improve our product roadmap. Having these tools will help us professionalize our data collection and expand our data analysis.

Describe your desired short-term and long-term outcomes of the 12-week LEAP Project sprint for both your organization and solution. [200-500 words recommended]

The short-term outcomes include the development of the evaluation kit that could help us standardize our implementations and gather data for papers and impact studies that we can publicize and disseminate to governments and educational NGOs, to grow its users base, raise more funding and scale up our platform.

In the long-term, we would also like to develop an evaluation kit to see the impact of Skalo on the teacher’s capabilities and on the student’s learning outcomes.