Eduten AI-Adaptive Maths — UNICEF-Backed Pilot Lifts Grade 5 Scores in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan's Ministry of Preschool and School Education (MoPSE) partnered with UNICEF's Global Learning Innovation Hub to pilot Eduten, a gamified AI-adaptive mathematics platform built by Eduten Ltd, a University of Turku (Finland) spin-off already deployed in Bhutan, Laos, Mongolia and Albania.

In late 2023, over a 12-week pilot, one weekly maths lesson was replaced with Eduten for 527 Grade 5 students across 17 public schools in Tashkent city and Tashkent region, while 519 Grade 5 students at the same schools continued with standard instruction as a comparison group; Eduten automatically adapts task difficulty to each student's own learning trajectory. Alongside the pilot, 17 classroom teachers and 17 school managers were trained on the platform and on the Finnish pedagogy behind it.

The comparison found students using Eduten improved their maths skills by 16.9% more and their arithmetic fluency by 10.2% more than the comparison group over the 12 weeks. Teachers reported that the platform's automatic difficulty adjustment let each child follow their own pace, and students engaged actively with its game-based exercise format.

Building on these findings, MoPSE has since trained 350 mathematics teachers across 220 schools in Tashkent city and region to use Eduten, with further national expansion under discussion. The evidence base is still limited to a single region, a single grade and one term: the design compared treatment and comparison groups rather than confirming individual-level random assignment, and no gender- or income-disaggregated results have been published, so equity impact and generalisability beyond Tashkent Grade 5 remain unverified.