Rigorous research conducted in Africa over the past decade has established positive

effects of onebillion's onecourse, an award-winning tablet-based curriculum, on
children's literacy and numeracy development in multiple settings (King et al. 2019;
Levesque et al. 2020; Levesque et al. 2022; Pitchford et al. 2017). A recent study
(Bardack et al., 2023) identified working memory skills as a unique predictor of high
versus low reading progress among children who participated in a tablet-based
curriculum program in a Malawi primary school. Nonetheless, no research has yet
examined a wider range of executive function (EF) skills in relation to academic
achievement in a tablet-based program. Beginning in 2023, the Malawi Ministry of
Education launched the Building Education Foundations through Innovation &
Technology (BEFIT), a national scale-up of the tablet-based curriculum program (using
onebillion's software in Chichewa) to all primary school children in Malawi. As part of
this effort, the current study will aim to examine how EF skills shape achievement in
BEFIT, and inform software improvements to support children who demonstrate
initially low EF skills.
We purposively selected two primary schools participating in BEFIT during the 2024
25 school year. All Standard 2 learners (384) were baseline assessed in October 2024
using the following assessment battery: Early Grade Reading and Maths Assessments,
forward and backward spatial span (i.e., visual short-term and working memory), pick
the-picture (i.e., working memory), and hearts and flowers (i.e., inhibitory control,
cognitive flexibility). We will administer the same battery at the endline assessment in
July 2025. Using regression analysis, we will examine how children's initial EF skills
and changes in these skills over time relate to literacy and numeracy gains. This
research will shed new light on how EFs promote learning in a tablet-based program,
thus informing continuous improvement of the software and program as BEFIT scales
nationally in Malawi.