Executive Summary

Project Host:

Project Host: CEPE Di Tella

Fellows:

Kaja Jasinska, Research Fellow
Rene Kizilcec, Research Fellow
Matt Lloyd-Rose, Team Lead, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Swetha Prakash, Social Entrepreneur Fellow

Introduction 

DECILE is a language evaluation tool, created by CEPE at the Di Tella university in Buenos Aires. It assesses the language skills of Spanish-speaking children with a hearing impairment aged 3 to 12 and is also suitable for neurodiverse populations.

By evaluating children's language attainment through simple tasks, it aims to provide educators with individual student metrics so they can make informed decisions about students’ pedagogical paths. Still in the pilot phase, DECILE has been evaluated with over 200 children with and without hearing impairment in Buenos Aires.

Although English language assessment tools exist, there is currently no tool designed to test Spanish linguistic structures and dialects. DECILE aims to become the gold standard tool for assessing the language skills of Spanish-speaking children.

The DECILE team at CEPE Di Tella are engaging in the LEAP project to strengthen their solution and prepare to scale it.

Organisation’s role & strength

Based at the School of Government at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, the Center for Evaluation of Policies and Evidence-Based Policy-Making (CEPE Di Tella) specializes in conducting applied research to improve the quality of public policies through the generation and use of rigorous evidence.

CEPE Di Tella’s Education and Behavioral Sciences Program focuses on the analysis of educational policies using social, pedagogical, economic, behavioral, and neuroscientific determinants of learning, with a particular emphasis on promoting equity and expanding opportunities for children from underserved populations.

Since 2017, CEPE Di Tella has collaborated with schools in Argentina to support the education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHoH) children. Within this line of work, DECILE plays a central role as an innovative tool for assessing language development in Spanish-speaking children, addressing a critical gap in available assessment instruments for this population.

DECILE enables large-scale, evidence-based monitoring of linguistic abilities while collecting key demographic and environmental variables that influence language development. The tool is designed with scalability in mind, aiming to inform educational practices and policy at a national and regional level, while providing personalized recommendations for educators, therapists, and families.

The development of DECILE reflects CEPE Di Tella’s interdisciplinary approach, combining expertise from education, behavioral sciences, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and public policy to advance both scientific understanding and practical interventions that foster inclusive, high-quality education.

Need summary

The DECILE team identified four priority needs for the LEAP project:

1. Limited Validation & Benchmarks: DECILE has been tested with a small user base, making its reliability and validity uncertain, especially in the absence of benchmarks for Spanish-speaking children.

2. Scalability & Adoption Challenges: While the team aspires to scale DECILE, there is no clear strategy for broader adoption, and its current design does not support independent use in classrooms.

3. Low Practical Value for Teachers/ Students: DECILE lacks a clear in-class usage protocol and does not yet provide meaningful insights or impact for teachers and students.

4. Technical & Implementation Barriers: The platform’s current capabilities do not support large-scale, independent use by educators, limiting its effectiveness beyond a research setting.

Solution summary & next steps

To address these needs, the LEAP project has created four corresponding deliverables.

1. A literature review of similar language assessments, and guide for psychometric analyses, created through reviewing secondary research and mapping the landscape of Spanish language assessments.

2. A Growth Toolkit, containing a growth roadmap for the next five years, a landscape analysis summarising lessons from similar products, an overview of key growth levers, a go-to-market strategy and tools to support effective scaling.

3. A proposal for a teacher-facing insights dashboard, co-designed with teachers, developed following a review of best practices for dashboard development.

4. Proposed UX flows for different stakeholders to ensure that teachers, students, and other key stakeholders can use the app in a self-directed way.

As a result of these LEAP project deliverables, DECILE will be able to:

1. Expand Validation & Benchmarking of DECILE with a larger, more diverse student sample and align it with best practices to establish reliability, validity, and effectiveness.

2. Strategically prepare for growth by refining the tool for wider implementation across Latin American schools, addressing diverse needs.

3. Plan technological improvements to support independent, large-scale use by teachers (incl. feedback dashboard, usage protocols).

These deliverables can also serve as a public good, with its tools and insights relevant both for others developing linguistic assessments or looking to scale a research-based ed-tech product.