A Visit to a Guayaquil High School

Tuesday, October 15, 2015 — In-the-field research is a key part of any consulting project.  This applies to the IBM's Corporate Service Corps projects. Consultants need direct evidence about factors that may be contributing to clients' challenges.

Our research took us yesterday to Colegio Nacional Rita Lecumberri. Located in the heart of Guayaquil, the colegio — high school — serves more than 2,000 students.  High school includes the eighth through thirteenth years of Ecuadorian students' basic education. This corresponds to grades seven through twelve in the U.S. system. Rita Lecumberri was originally an all-girls' school. Its enrollment now includes boys.

Colegio Nacional Rita Lecumberri is an urban high school in Guayaquil serving 2000 students, mostly from lower middle-class families.

Well controlled regimentation is one's first impression upon entering the school.  Physical access to the building is tightly controlled. Students wear uniforms. Those participating in physical education classes — occurring in the school's central courtyard — begin and end in military-style formations.

Students at Rita Lecumberri stand in formation to begin their physical education.

Seeing Rita Lecumberri's Information and Computer Technology (ICT) lab in action was the primary purpose of our field trip. We enjoyed a brief interview with the principal, a thirty-year educator in Guayaquil. We visited a mathematics class for students in their final "senior" year. 

Rita Lecumberri students use the APCI application during their "senior" mathematics class.

Our presence — and that of a production crew filming a documentary on technology and innovation in education — no doubt provided a disruption to the class' routine. The principal and teacher were gracious hosts. The students — particularly those with English skills — interacted with us enthusiastically.

The ICT lab only provides a portion of the students' instruction in Mathematics and Spanish language. Teachers deliver much of the instruction via traditional means. This includes classroom lectures, whiteboards, and textbooks. Activities in the ICT lab reinforce the "traditional" instruction. They also indicate how well students grasp instruction delivered by more traditional means.

A Rita Lecumberri student completes a mathematics exercise in the Information and Computer Technology (ICT) lab.

The ICT lab is shared by all grades in the school. There are 80 computers in two labs. Each of the 2,000 gets two to three one-hour sessions per week in the lab. One session is for math and one for language.

The teacher gave us lots of time to interact with the students. The principal told us during the interview afterwards that, that was part of the plan. She wants her charges to be exposed to people of different backgrounds. 

Research for our project and practice in speaking and listening to Spanish were the two primary benefits we got from the visit. We got to see first-hand how Edúcate's services work in a real-life classroom environment. Student's unsurprisingly prefer the interactive Apendijaze Personalizado Complementario y Interconectado (APCI) learning tool to traditional lectures and books.

We also sought information about the penetration of ICT into students' homes and lives outside of school.  Nearly all students in this sample of lower middle-income families have computers and internet in their homes. The Rita Lecumberri principal told us that parents now consider computers and internet a necessity.

Sophie Asmus, IBM CSC project teammate for the Edúcate project, talks to Rita Lecumberri students in the computer lab.

We were surprise to find smart-phone penetration as high as it was. Google's "Our Mobile Planet" study for 2013 provides no explicit information about smart-phone penetration for Ecuador or any of its neighbors. We use per-capita GDP as a proxy. Ecuador's per-capita GDP is about $11,000.  This puts it in the neighborhood of China ($11,800) and Indonesia ($9,400).

Those two countries' smart-phone penetration was 47% and 14%, respectively. This range doesn't suggest that GDP is a good predictor.  Our survey of the class found that about 40% of the students had smartphones. This puts Ecuador at the high range for its country.

Finally, we found the class to be intelligent and engaging. A minority of its members had strong conversational English skills.  Nonetheless, I was able to stumble through some interesting conversation. One group of girls and I discussed how public education in the U.S. is financed.