SENESCYT–World Bank ALEKS Math-Remediation RCT — National Digital Personalized Learning for Ecuador's First-Year College Students

Ecuador's Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT) and the World Bank ran this activity to address the roughly one-third of Ecuadorian first-year college students who drop out within a year, often because of unaddressed gaps in foundational mathematics.

The activity aimed to remediate foundational math skills among first-year students using an AI-adaptive learning platform in order to reduce dropout and repetition.

In 2020-2021, amid COVID-19 school closures, the team offered free licenses for ALEKS - an AI-adaptive platform that models each student's mastery of pre-calculus topics and sequences practice accordingly - to first-year students across 71 technical and technological institutes. A randomized controlled trial compared students offered access, of whom 5,077 activated licenses, against a control group not offered access.

Students offered ALEKS scored 0.28 standard deviations higher on a standardized math test than controls (p<0.01), a gain the authors describe as equivalent to roughly two years of learning compressed into four months of platform use, with impact proportional to time spent on the platform. The intervention also produced a marginally significant decline in course-repetition probability, concentrated among male students, but no measurable effect on third-semester enrollment. It was delivered at approximately $18 per student. Monthly usage followed a concave curve, climbing from 59% of licensed students in January to an 86% peak in February-March before falling to just 7% by May.

The authors conclude that sustained engagement, not just access, drove the results, and that motivational follow-up is needed to prevent drop-off. The RCT covers one cohort during a pandemic-disrupted semester; outcomes from a non-emergency, steady-state scale-up have not yet been published.