Abstract

Illiteracy costs the world economy more than USD 1 trillion annually in direct costs. On the other hand, smartphones are now ubiquitous all over the world, and they are already having a huge impact on several areas of the economy. In this paper, we analyze the implementation of ConectaIdeas Express, a smartphone-based app that supports teachers to teach reading and writing to first graders. The app was adopted by 1,235 low SES schools, most of them with poor technological infrastructure and unreliable internet. All training was done through a weekly email and one-minute videos. We collected the assessments of 568,524 students’ answers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest dataset of first graders’ assessments ever reported. Doing learning analytics we found important gender differences in reading, writing and oral communication. The biggest gap was in writing, and particularly in students from rural schools, and also with male teachers. The biggest gender gap in writing was in two specific Learning Objectives of the curriculum. This information provides very accurate feedback to curriculum developers in order to redesign textbooks, assessments and materials, and to teachers and stakeholders to help adjust teaching practices.