Reflective Learning

COVID-19 has disrupted learning globally, exacerbating learning poverty by a third affecting 70% of ten-year-olds, especially in low to middle-income countries. In South Africa alone, a staggering 500,000 students have dropped out of education, with poor academic results being a major contributing factor. This has been exacerbated by a problem that already existed before the pandemic: learning backlogs. 

It’s been proven that learners in poorer socioeconomic environments are experiencing the worse effects of learning loss. This has been seen on a local level, with South African learners showing significant gaps in understanding, preventing higher-level learning.

“Without strong foundational skills, children are unlikely to acquire the technical and higher-order skills needed to thrive in increasingly demanding labor markets and more complex societies.” - World Bank

This problem is robbing students, especially those within lower-income communities, of their future lifetime earnings by restricting career opportunities. For most, it’s a perpetuation of our discriminatory past, with Dr Nic Spaull’s research showing that these learning gaps are divided along socioeconomic lines. 

Learners from the poorest 60% of schools having backlogs in Maths of, on average, four grade levels by the end of Grade 9. Reflective Learning’s assessments show that these backlogs widen further until learners are six grade levels behind when writing Grade 12 exams.

Unfortunately, there are many significant barriers to an impactful systemic remedial solution: 

• Every learner has different gaps in their learning thus having specific learning needs. 

• Teachers struggle to cope with large class numbers.

• Teachers are not trained to teach content from previous phases where the backlogs begin. 

• There are few, if any, age-appropriate resources focused on older learners needing Math & English support at lower levels. 

• Digital solutions can often be data-heavy becoming costly.

Reflective Learning's catch-up tool is specifically designed to assist learners who have fallen behind, catch them up to where they need to be, and unlock their potential to pursue STEM careers. 

We first diagnose learning gaps on key foundational concepts that are required for more advanced knowledge. Having pinpointed which concepts they struggle with and how far to go back, students are then provided individualised lessons that target their gaps, along pedagogically-sound learning pathways.

The lessons are highly-interactive, data-light, and gamified through a digital currency and shop. Students are re-assessed after completing their catch-up lessons to track their improvement and where gaps still exist. Based on their level of mastery, students are either cycled back to their necessary learning or progress onto a new learning journey.

Students’ effective ability for each concept is recorded in terms of grade levels. And, thanks to the personalised nature of the tool, students can catch up as many as four years of backlogs in approximately 40 hours of learning time, having a significant impact on school-level marks.

The Reflective Learning 'school success' team supports schools from initiation to impact. To ensure an effective implementation and maximum long-lasting impact within lower-income and underserved schools and communities, Reflective Learning developed the "ACT" (Assess, Catch-up, and Track) programme. 

The framework is aligned with the RAPID Framework in that it:

1. Reaches many students through scalable, innovative and accessible technology

2. Assesses each students’ current level of understanding in Math and English

3. Prioritizes establishing the fundamental building blocks of basic literacy and numeracy skills before teaching higher-level concepts. 

4. Increases the rate of learning to as high as four times, with the personalised catch-up allowing students to catch up on average one year for every ten hours spent on the platform. 

5. Develops students’ metacognition, mindset, and motivation through continuous acknowledgement of effort and achievement in-program and through feedback reports. 

Several case studies demonstrate high levels of impact. In one such high school, failure rates dropped by 5-times and marks of 60% or above increased 5-fold from previous years.

For South Africa’s lower quintile (under-resourced, non-fee paying) schools and in a majority of communities across Africa, many students and teachers face the following hurdles to: 

(1) preventing a further decline in learning outcomes, and 

(2) actively improving their current learning outcomes.

Specifically: 

1. Students have limited access to qualified teaching staff and one-on-one support as the teacher shortage worsens. 

2. Teachers are struggling to cope with large class numbers as students are unable to grasp what’s being taught, which leads to further disruptions and further loss of learning time. 

3. Teachers are not trained to teach concepts from previous phases where the backlogs begin. 

4. There are limited (if any) age-appropriate resources that focus on older students needing Maths & English support at lower grade levels. 

5. Poor connectivity limits access to benefitting from any form of digital support. 

6. Curriculum policies and requirements force teachers to continue with new work despite knowing that a majority of their students won’t be able to understand what they’re teaching. This widens the gaps further and the cycle continues.

Our goal is to stop the cycle, close the gaps, and ensure all students have the foundational skills necessary to unlock future learning.

From a student’s perspective, this is done by:

1. Identifying the prior knowledge and gaps that a student has.

2. Defining a personalised pathway of learning that is the quickest route to catch up.

3. Providing catch-up content on their specific journey that targets their gaps.

4. Re-assessing students to demonstrate that they can improve.

How this impacts their lives:

1. No matter where students come from or the quality of previous education, they can catch up to their grade-level-expected knowledge within 1 year of using the platform. 

2. Students are able to continue their school journey with the required understanding to advance to higher-level concepts

3. After successfully seeing improvements through the platform, students develop metacognitive awareness which allows them to apply the process of learning to other subjects and areas of their lives

4. Students can choose STEM subjects at a later stage due to having the foundations in place 

From a teacher’s perspective, they get access to a tool that:

1. Reduces the amount of time required to diagnose learning gaps.

2. Bridges the gap between assessment and learning.

3. Gives them greater opportunity to focus on the teaching of curriculum.

4. Provides evidence to parents of improvements taking place.

Teachers start seeing huge improvements, both qualitative and quantitative, from early on in the intervention. 

Qualitatively, teachers are reporting: 

1. Improved class engagement as students start recognizing what they’ve learnt on Reflective Learning in the lessons teachers are teaching. 

2. Students are less fearful of being wrong and asking questions when they aren’t sure of concepts- this is encouraged through our emphasis on having a growth mindset. 

3. Increased job satisfaction and enjoyment in the classroom

Quantitatively, once sufficient catch-up has taken place, whole grade averages can improve by 15%+ when using the tool consistently.

Reflective Learning’s team, from inception, has been made up of people with key areas of expertise required to solve the education challenge effectively. 

Tracey Butchart (Co-founder & Head of learning design): 

A learning design and curriculum expert, with 30 years’ experience in education in South Africa, currently studying PhD in Maths education.

Keelan Whiting (CEO & Co-founder): 

a tech entrepreneur that has significant experience in leading software projects from start to finish. 

Eugene Pelteret (COO & Co-founder): 

an operational and implementation specialist, with an MBA and a wealth of experience working with impoverished communities and populations. 

Aidan Wilmot (CTO):

a highly experienced software engineer that has built major systems across the education, logistics and financial sectors, working with some of South Africa's largest corporates (Shoprite Checkers, Virgin Money, UNISA etc.). 

In education, especially as we’ve seen in South Africa, the various departments and groups of people working in the space operate in siloes. The integration of academia, technical technology, pedagogy and implementation for rolling-out a long-term solution in education requires having a diverse team with the relevant skills (as mentioned) to collaborate to ensure all these components are considered. 

In terms of the technology, research and pedagogy of Reflective Learning’s solution, we are able to meet the needs otf the students and teachers. Thanks to curriculum-agnostic content, the Reflective Learning platform is globally relevant. And having a large proportion of previous teachers allows us to know the constraints and needs of teachers as they experience them in the classroom. 

In South Africa:

Our implementation works as a school-partnership model, which has been developed through many iterations and in-person visits thanks to our proximity to the schools we serve. 

When we look to expand to other countries:

We develop local partnerships with organisations located in the communities we’re looking to expand to. This allows us to meet the needs of local agendas and implement according to the best practices in those unique contexts. 

What we’ve accomplished so far: 

• We’ve worked with 350 schools around South Africa

• Completed two smaller round of investments 

• Established partnerships and implemented the tool successfully in two countries outside of South Africa:

1. Australia 

2. United Kingdom 

What we’ve built and tested so far:

2017-2019

• The initial diagnostics platform was designed and tested. 

  • With over 20,000 learners assessed. 

2020-2024 

• The scalable app & teacher dashboard was built. 

  • Diagnostics & catch-up in two subjects (Maths & English).

  • 70k+ active learners per year, 

• Had the platform translated into a second language (Afrikaans)

• Built a “just in time” implementation process and team for a wide range of communities. 

  • This involves tracking engagement rates and working proactively with schools to ensure greater contact time with the software.

• Hardware kit offering established to support implementation (access to technology) and supports the Reflective Learning software.

2025 

• We are currently building the web-app into an offline version to bridge into more rural areas with poor connectivity.

Reflective Learning has made good progress implementing in South Africa. However, as we move into the international space we seek:

1. Access to international networks of impact-driven programs to seek partnerships in other countries to help implement our solution in new territories. 

2. Access to international resources and audience to build a rigorous evidence base (M&E) to provide further support for implementation in countries outside of South Africa

Reflective Learning’s solution directly addresses the issues exacerbated by Covid-19 through innovative, and accessible technology and implementation. 

This is how we are different in our approach that allows us to see the impact we have:

1. Our structure: 

Instead of entering the content of our learning platform at their school grade, students start on Reflective Learning at their measured functional grade level. The learning pathway follows conceptual development from their current level of mastery to their required grade level of mastery. At each concept, their mastery is measured on grade-level competency, which is validated against international benchmarks (e.g. TIMSS). 

2. Diagnostic assessments: 

Before students begin, our diagnostic assessments pinpoint exactly where the break in learning took place on a conceptual and grade level. Few, if any, other solutions gather this data before attempting to solve the learning challenge. 

3. Innovative Learning content to build conceptual understanding:

Our content uses explicit instruction and a multiple-strategy approach to teaching new content. We focus on building base conceptual understanding through explicit teaching, as opposed to fluency or exam preparation through practice and worked examples. 

4. Our pedagogy & curriculum alignment: 

Reflective Learning’s content focuses on the underlying concepts that all school curricula depend on. By decoupling from the curriculum and providing logical learning pathways, we fill in the gaps that the curricula-pacing has created. Above providing content at the right level for every student, our unique metacognitive approach embeds activities in the learning process that encourage the students to take ownership of their learning. 

The credibility of our pedagogy has been validated by Education Alliance Finland, where we received a 93% score for our pedagogy and ability to improve learning outcomes. 

5. System-led targetted instruction: 

Our software places the student at the helm of their learning journey, no matter the route required to catch-up to where they need to be. Once a student starts on Reflective Learning, their diagnostic assessments, results, personalised catch-up course, and steps-to-follow are all prompted in a logical order by the system itself. This takes the responsibility and accountability from the teacher and places it on the learner, while providing them with all the tools required to improve their foundational understanding. This scalable and, yet, very personalised approach has made our solution recognized globally as an impactful innovation. 

6. Evidence-led indicators of success:

Through our data, we are able to measure the number of years caught up, the time it has taken to catch up, and the relative speed of catch-up (eg. students learning at twice the normal rate of learning). By creating a clear measure of what it means to catch up, we are better able to succeed.

1. The Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Challenge is due to learning gaps. 

The difference between the expected grade-level of a student and their actual level of competency. This forces students to continue with a curriculum they cannot understand yet, while widening the gap between those who have access to quality education resources and those who do not. 

Nic Spaull’s research showed, prior to Covid-19, that in the poorest 60% of South African Schools, students are on average four grade-levels behind in understanding by the end of grade 9. Reflective Learning’s assessments show that these backlogs widen further until learners are six grade levels behind when writing Grade 12 exams.

2. Activities: Go back to fix the gaps

Scalable software and implementation allow students to: 

1. go back and learn everything they’ve missed

2. learn at the level they last understood the subjects, no matter how early the gaps may originate

3. go through the content at the pace that works best for them

4. develop a growth mindset and metacognitive skillset for future learning

3. Outputs: improved understanding of foundational concepts

After going through a round of catch-up students are re-assessed to demonstrate their improvement as a direct result of the targeted catch-up. This is where we see:

• An improvement in foundational understanding and concept mastery 

• Students catching up to their required grade-level understanding 

4. Outcomes: improved grade-level marks

• After a few rounds of catch-up, students start experiencing visible improvements in grade-level marks. 

• Improvements in grade marks across an entire cohort of up to 15%, and many more similar success stories. Read our case studies here. 

• A third-party researcher conducted a study to assess the quality of our impact in a local non-fee-paying school. He found that “Grade 8 learners [when using Reflective Learning’s tool] are almost 5 times more likely to pass mathematics and exactly 5 times more likely to pass mathematics with a greater than 60%.” Read the full report here.

5. Impact: greater career opportunities and future earning potential

• As students progress through their educational, better foundational learning will inevitably lead to better school results in critical school-leaving exams. These exams determine the prospects of tertiary studies and thus career opportunities. 

• Students who complete a bachelor’s (or equivalent thereof) degree on a tertiary level are likely to earn 62% more than those who only complete their upper secondary level of education. 

• So, simply by providing greater access to a wider range of potential careers, students have the ability to choose those with more professionality or earning potential should they wish to.

Being aimed at addressing SDG 4, our goal is to develop a highly impactful solution to catch up critical foundations in literacy and numeracy. 

We measure our ability to do this by:

Lead indicators:

• The proportion of students logging in each week onto the software.

• Average engagement time per student for those that login.

Lag indicators:

• Grade-level competency: we measure the increase of functional proficiency in students by looking at the difference between baseline diagnostics and later assessment. This is measured in estimated grade-level competency.

School-based marks: as students improve their understanding, their school marks will improve. We track the improvement of cohort-based marks, benchmarking them against their school’s historical records of attainment.

Pedagogical technology is used to solve the following key questions in creating an effective learning solution:

1. What are the most important concepts to be mastered?

   1. 81 Mathematics concepts

   2. 40 English Concepts

2. In what order should they be tackled?

   1. Learning trajectories are formed from the most simple concept and build in complexity to the most advanced concept. 

   2. Students are provided their learning paths from the most simple to the most complex concepts.

3. How do we use the subject to produce a better learner, not just better understanding of the content?

   1. Metacognitive activities allow students to get a higher-level understanding of their own cognition and abilities. 

   2. This is done through making students ‘Analyse their results’ and acknowledge their gaps before starting each concept.

   3. Students are also asked repeatedly if they feel they’ve understood concepts as they’ve learned them, and this is compared with their actual understanding shown in assessments. 

   4. The goal is to close the gap between what students feel they can do and what they can actually do to enhance learning and motivation. 

4. How do we learn content best using the latest cognitive science? 

   1. Our platform ensures students go through the correct process of learning, which is: 

      1. Building knowledge incrementally and conceptually

      2. Fluency through retrieval activities

      3. Exam preparation through past papers. 

5. How do we overcome the particular challenges of cumulative learning gaps over the years? 

   1. Teaching at the right level: Learning content is designed to meet students at the level they last understood. This can go back all the way to grade 1 if needed. 

   2. Vertical approach: teaching students entire concepts from the most simple principles to the more advanced applications before moving on to the following concept in the learning path.

Technical technology: 

1. 1. It is built on MongoDB, Node js, and GCP, with our content captured in Strapi. 

   2. Web-based app (soon to be native app)

   3. The user experience is highly gamified and interactive, fully mobile responsive, and rewards students for positive learning interactions. 

Implementation technology:

1. 1. ‘Just-in-time’ service methodology based on real-time data derived from our database

Full-time staff: 28

Part-time staff: 2

Contractors: 5

Reflective Learning has been established since 2017, meaning we’ve been working on our solution for seven years.

A fundamental strength of our implementation is based on overcoming cultural barriers and strengthening collaboration between groups of people who share the same mission. This means that our team has to represent the communities we’re aiming to serve, not because it’s a matter of compliance, but rather to have an institutional understanding of the real experience, insights, and cultural nuances that are unique to these contexts. 

Reflective Learning’s values underpin all operations, internal and external, the first value being: Giving equal opportunity – allowing people to fulfill their potential. This is seen in our hiring and employee training practices. 

Our product itself is a demonstration of inclusivity as the solution seeks to bridge the skills gap and opportunity divide that generally develops due to socioeconomic backgrounds. 

We believe in the innovativeness of youth. More than 80% of the Reflective Learning team are considered youth in the South African context. This is a significant and valuable component of inclusion, as the rate of youth unemployment in South Africa is currently peaking at 50.47%.

Given that the challenge of learning gaps cuts across all socioeconomic backgrounds in education, Reflective Learning has ensured that we offer products and services that cater for both the quality expected at a top-end level, but also the accessibility required in lower-resourced communities. 

Product and services we offer:

Diagnostic and catch-up software for Maths and English

ICT hardware kit to overcome infrastructure deficit

Monitoring and evaluation reporting

Project management

Benchmark reporting

Working across many cultures and LSMs, we have established multiple routes to market (the products and services provided depends on the context and need):: 

Schools and school groups:

We are a teacher-based tool that helps solve their specific need of catching up gaps from previous years where other software focuses on curriculum delivery. Schools are paired up with a school success manager who guides them from initiation to impact using our ‘just in time’ service process. Licenses are sold at a cohort-level and paid for annually. We have high retention rates thus creating a recurring revenue stream.

Impact investors: corporates and foundations investing in lower-end communities

For schools that are unable to fund their own access, corporations purchase our services through their social responsibility budget to communities that are scoped out with the company. These schools required greater support to implement with efficacy, and as such we have built out a project management and service model that helps to overcome many typical barriers to using educational technology resources. For some corporates, there is a marketing need to fulfill, while others a regulatory requirement.

Families:

We are currently launching a direct-to-consumer model which will allow families to purchase access for one or multiple children where their schools do not provide access. Due to the cost to acquire and service individual clients, they fall into a higher cost bracket but this is still substantially less expensive than regular tutoring which is often the alternative.

We are conscious that being financially sustainable is often a long-term goal for educational companies. 

After bootstrapping the company for three years, we took an initial round of seed capital to rebuild our tool (2019). Since then, we have worked hard to build the revenue streams mentioned prior and have been successful in achieving profitability over the past two years. More recently we took on a second round of investment (2023), but purely for strategic purposes. 

During this time, we have partnered with many CSI departments (eg. Standard Bank, Telkom Foundation, Allan Gray Philanthropies, Tshikululu), while selling the tool to school groups (eg. Spark Schools), non-profit organisations (eg. Click Foundation) and many other individual schools.

We have started to grow our focus toward international markets, with schools in the United Kingdom and Australia already using our product. We will continue to focus on growth in these and other territories.

Also as we look forward, we believe that large-scale projects throughout Africa are important to focus on. To enable this, we have already started development critical relationships and are doing a second rebuild of our tool to enable offline accessibility.

Finally, as we launch our direct-to-consumer model (family offering), we are well-positioned to partner with corporates to offer employees and broader partners a SAAS-style service of our tool through reduced licencing or a Value-Added-Services model.

We are currently working with more than 350 institutions with a user base of more than 70 000 students. Through these revenue streams, we anticipate being able to grow both our financial sustainability and impact. We believe these two need to work hand-in-hand to grow our reach, impact and growth prospects.