TT Advisers
- Nonprofit
In 2022, the rate of young Vietnamese children aged 6-12 currently having access to education is 94.4%, a figure considered high in the group of developing countries. But this only represents the bare minimum access to education. Unequal opportunities in education is the core cause of the differences in the ability to acquire knowledge. In distant, mountainous or isolated regions of the country, students hardly have access to school and learning facilities. Despite the Vietnam government’s policies to exempt or reduce tuition fees for the poor, their parents barely have money to offer private tutors for academic support, or to even send their children to public schools. These parents’ limited knowledge restrains them from becoming tutors for their own children.
TT ADVISERS (Thanh Tri Advisers, founded in 2018) was born with the mission of providing opportunities that have not been reached to young children. We want to shorten the knowledge gap of Vietnamese children in improving academic subjects and, furthermore, necessary social skills. To resolve limited opportunities in academic pursuit, TT Advisers offer completely free adviser-advisee service. The service includes two processes: selection of advisers, and academic aid for young students.
We selected our Adviser team based on their academic competence. Our selection round for Advisers is competitive: the candidate must demonstrate high capabilities for academic achievements and develop an ability to work, communicate, and inspire small children. We developed a rigorous selection process, including an application round to gather basic information of the candidate, an academic test to ensure quality of the Advisers, and an interview to test the compatibility of the Advisers with children and with the team. When they pass these tests, they become a member of the team. Our team then builds a set of rules when communicating with children, research knowledge and apply these as training sessions in the organization, to ensure quality of the experience received by children.
Our Adviser team got their experience beforehand with students from secondary school, aged from 12-15 from 2018 to 2021. From 2021 to now, we are currently expanding our education to smaller children, aged 6-12, who need extra coaching on school subjects. To approach the young children, we first use our Advisors in these regions to reach out and tell the targeted students to try our service. Interested students contact the project's fanpage through the information that they received, and our organization will delegate an adviser according to their class, subject, and knowledge needs. Our adviser team will also set up an assessment test for the student to know their level and ability to perform on tests.
After these processes, we create a one-to-one environment between the student and the Advisor. An Adviser gets to know our students through subtle and gradual communication to create a comfortable environment. We want to show that the students can freely and safely share with us any thoughts about the subject, their personal world, and their surroundings, before the students delve into new knowledge provided by the Advisers.
Our Advisers create weekly meeting sessions, either online (or offline if children do not have access to the Internet) to answer and aid the students’ studying. We also recommend our students to message, or ask us questions directly in case the students have no smart devices. Questions can be about any issue: their academic life, their extracurriculars, and their lives in general. An Adviser always accompanies his/her Advisee throughout the process. We make sure that our advice and lessons will be tailored specifically for each Advisee; in other words, our knowledge will be personalized and be unique for each student.
Therefore, we are committed to providing students with a completely public, free teaching and mentoring program, personalized for children between the ages of 6 and 12 in low-income, middle-income communities.
- Primary school children (ages 5-12)
- Rural
- Peri-Urban
- Poor
- Low-Income
- Middle-Income
- Vietnam
- Vietnam
Regarding our inputs, TT Advisers tends to follow a user-centered approach to enhance the quality of the program and personalize advisee’s learning experience. First, our inputs have been collected from children’s feedback surveys at the end of each lesson or period. The short survey implemented after each lesson includes simple questions asking students about whether they caught up with the lesson or not, what they liked or most impressed about the lesson, what they struggled with, what they want to develop and what can be improved inside the classroom, etc.
Each adviser directly reads the feedback gathered from the surveys, uses that data, as well as assessment scores from other advisers to fix their curriculum and teaching skill simultaneously. The process of designing and altering the curriculum is continuous and successive. This enables mentors to comprehend their own mentees, simplify the learning process, and promptly make appropriate and practical adjustments to teaching methods.
Regarding our community, we first find our students through media attention, offline school campaigns, invitations from our Advisers and connections.
- Media attention: Our program builds a Facebook page, which provides and shares useful information, academic knowledge and necessary social skills. This page is the official portal to inform our academic mentorship. Currently our fan page has more than 12000 likes and followers with a reach that averaged approximately 2,000 people per post. In addition to this, our organization asks for partnerships of reputable, well-known organizations, or localized institutions to reach students and spread the service of our product.
- Offline school campaigns: We have Advisers, volunteers and members going to schools in the determined area, remote areas, public places, to spread information about the class. If they need any assistance, our volunteers and advisers will accompany both the students and their parents to be in our solution.
- Invitations from our Advisers: Advisers reach out to our targeted students, possibly in their area, have some chat and invite them to use the opportunity. If the Adviser is the sole Adviser in the area, he/she will be contacting and maintaining the quality of mentoring.
- Connections: We use our connections at the remote areas to invite more students to our class.
Since then, we have mentored 416 students throughout the course of 2021-now.
Problem:
Parents have high expectations for young children, and will demonetize children for their low grades. But curriculums are getting harder, so some children cannot learn and lose self-motivation for study.
Our activities:
Our organization assesses children’s needs and provides free mentorship, including frequent re-assessments, supplementary materials and additional coaching to improve and create learning habits for children in Vietnam.
Our outputs: (note: n = sample size)
In 2021, 2/3 (n = 60) of students engaged more than 10 hours into the program, and 75% of those who engaged (n = 40) improved their performance on standardized tests. In 2022, 77.8% (n = 76) of students invest more than 10 hours into the program. 65.8% (n = 56) of students improved their score and felt satisfied about the test results. The students’ respective feedback and parents’ feedback suggest a positive development.
Short-term outcomes
66.4% students (n = 116) reported that they are not demonetized for low test scores. Parents see the improvement in these young children’s grades.
Long-term outcomes
Students are happier, willingly pursue academic challenges, and manage to pick up experiences and skills in projects.
Parents have a sense of pride with their children’s scores, which leads to better family relationships. Studies have shown that security and happiness in family relationships decrease the chance of stress and depression for children's intellectual and emotional development.
Our current approach is on Level 2 according to the Nesta Standards of Evidence. We are currently using pre and post-surveys to measure changes in grades and in interest of subject. Before we mentor our students, we surveyed them using a questionnaire regarding grade performance and subject needs. After they finish the mentorship period, we survey them using a questionnaire to detect change in grade performance, and receive qualitative feedback on the courses.
Our evidence supports our claim and quality of the mentorship. This acts as proof for the teachers to believe in the quality of our assistance, and allows us to approach schools in remote areas.
We’re measuring our solution’s impact based on both quantitative and qualitative indicators.
The quantitative indicators of our impact include:
Hours of engagement: The number of kids remaining in the mentorship program beyond 10 hours means they have been impacted to have a mindset to move on forward of improving themselves by committing to more than 2 weeks time.
Academic grades: The grades in their academic results indicate the direct measurable improvement in their ability to comprehend and tackle academic contents.
Time engagement in extracurriculars: For skill-based and experience-based courses, the amount of extra curricular sx achievements, project engagement time, position of involvement, and an assessment score were given by the “Advisers” on the specific skills.
The qualitative indicators of our impact include:
Firstly, a 250 words minimum qualitative reflection essay for the advisees on their experience with the mentorship program and what they learned and felt. We’ll measure our success on the criteria of HAPPI:
Humanity: How much feeling of connectivity did they feel? How much did they expand their network through mentorship?
Awareness: How much self-awareness do they exhibit in their thought, being aware of their strengths and weaknesses?
Positivity: How much positivity did they feel? In what ways were they happy or not?
Passion: How much the mentorship helped them with realizing their ambitions?
Intellect: How much they felt they have learned
Secondly, we also ask our Advisers to provide individual assessments of each Advisee on the same HAPPI criteria.
Thirdly, we ask the parents to give us an assessment and feedback from their children’s retelling of their experience to them, then we match and assess our impact based on the HAPPI criteria.
We match Advisers to provide for children from the age of 6-12 to accommodate their intellectual, skillset and experiential needs.
- Pilot
As we mentioned above, TT Advisers (or Thanh Tri Advisers) is an educational project that focuses on personalized education for disadvantaged children and parents. In Vietnam where most children only have access to minimum education, getting good grades and keeping up with peers becomes daunting for some, especially when the curriculum is constantly getting harder.
TTA focuses on 2 main programs: 1-1 mentorship and additional coaching. With 1-1 mentorship, we focus on offering students a personal Adviser with academic tutor program, cross-field skills and life experience coaching. After finishing the program, the adviser will receive additional coaching which is a community-based learning to use peer learning and possibly make them become an Adviser of the program.
We have 5 main research questions:
1. How can we make academic knowledge from the Vietnamese curriculum relevant to aid the child’s future development in the global society?
2. How to help children form a self-learning mindset through 1-1 mentorship model?
3. How to form or develop intellectual curiosity in children who have lost interest and faith in education as a whole?
4. What are the minimal necessary knowledge, skill sets, and experiences needed for a student who has lost their basics?
5. How much time is needed to help a child realize their dreams?
Due to our scope and feasibility, we hope that LEAP Fellows can help us answer these research questions. Question 1 and 4 will require a meta-analysis and in-depth research into the efficiency of each subject and knowledge fields in the current Vietnamese curriculum then compare with the global demands on skills, knowledge and experiences to determine what changes need to be made to the education system to prepare students for the global society. Question 2 and 3 will require investigation into models of learning competencies, child intellectual development psychology, and motivational psychology- we can synthesize and apply these to real practice. Question 5 will use a robust method combined with application of counseling and experiential exposure to various societal roles, hoping to see the correlation of the hours the students spend in our mentorship and outcome of the realization of the dreams of these students.
Question 5 will be the start of research on the effects of the control group (Level 3 of the Nesta standards). We expect to measure the efficiency of our methods compared to other educational attempts as well as recognizing more social niche to help our Advisers improve their methods and even the general standards for future development of our model to meet with more intellectual, skillset and experiential demands.
We also expect to push further with Level 4 evidence that could help our educational model provide not just tangible knowledge, skills and experiences but also accreditation for our students’s efforts to be recognized in the future competitive job market. We want to empower the underprivileged to rise up, challenge their socio-economic status and escape poverty. Also, having an independent evaluation helps our educational model to reflect upon itself to improve its services.
At level 5 evidence integration, we expect to replicate our educational impact to fit in the multiple socio-economic contexts in other countries. In this process, we can see our flaws and variations to be able to adapt our impact to academic knowledge, skillsets and experiences in the entirety of humanity across many cultures and linguistic barriers. This change is going to be available from 2024 onwards.
Deliverables useful to our organization as outputs of the LEAP sprint:
Examination and analysis of how one’s awareness of their thoughts and feelings in the moment relates to realization about their dreams and desires.
Research framework to monitor and measure the psychological process of realizing the ambition.
We hope that the framework will help us classify students into different categories, so that we can make changes accordingly to our personalized mentorship. We envision that our prospective students and communities will have a clear goal to pursue, and know what they have to study to have correlation with the real world. Moreover, we hope that students who already have a specific alignment can strengthen our community and inspire more students, not only around the country, but also around the globe.