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Good practice

Plan Ceibal — Uruguay's national adaptive mathematics platform for primary education

Uruguay · Montevideo · See the Uruguay profile

National adaptive mathematics platform (PAM) for all Uruguayan primary (grades 3-6) and lower secondary students since 2013. An independent CINVE quasi-experimental study (2,143 students, 237 schools) found a +0.20 SD maths score gain, with larger effects for lower-SES pupils.

0.20 SD
Mathematics score gain (2013-2016)
2143
Students tracked (2013-2016)
237 public and private schools
Schools covered (2013-2016)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Plan Ceibal
Period
2013–present
Keywords
government, primary education, adaptive learning, ed-tech

Context

Plan Ceibal began in 2007 as Uruguay's nationwide One Laptop Per Child programme. By 2013 it had developed PAM (Plataforma Adaptativa de Matemática), an AI-driven adaptive mathematics exercise platform progressively expanded to all students in primary grades 3-6 and lower-secondary grades 1-3, free at point of use.

Objectives

To raise mathematics achievement by dynamically adjusting problem difficulty to each student's prior responses and by giving teachers dashboard analytics of class-wide and individual learning gaps.

Activities

PAM assigns maths problems adaptively with immediate automated feedback; teachers receive dashboards highlighting learning gaps to guide classroom intervention; Uruguay's near-universal device coverage from the original laptop programme removed typical access barriers to adaptive ed-tech.

Results

An independent quasi-experimental longitudinal study by CINVE tracked 2,143 students across 237 public and private schools from 2013-2016 and found that greater PAM use was associated with a +0.20 standard-deviation gain in mathematics scores, with a larger effect for lower-socioeconomic-status students and no significant gender difference.

Conclusions

The effect size is described as modest, the evaluation window covers only 2013-2016, and no more recent randomised controlled trial has been published; results may not generalise beyond Uruguay's unusually high device saturation and public digital infrastructure.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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