Stanford Seed conducted an impact case study as a part of their Stanford Seed Transformation Program in 2019. Stanford Seed operated throughout Africa, India, and Sri Lanka for this program.
The Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) partnered with entrepreneurs in emerging economies to build thriving enterprises that can transform lives and end the cycle of global poverty. The Seed Transformation Programme is a one-year intensive entrepreneurship education program for leaders. After completion, the participants can access varied Seed network services such as coaching, consulting, networking & skill-building events. Seed offers access to training opportunities that challenges leaders to reassess their company’s vision and make ambitious changes towards growth that will ultimately transform lives.
Chrysalis, an education company from India, participated in the program to understand the impact of its flagship curriculum on students. “Schools for Awakening Human Potential” is their comprehensive, activity-based curriculum for pre-primary and primary school children.
The Seed impact study raised the following questions:
- What evidence do we have to measure Chrysalis’s contribution to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, i.e. to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all?
- What evidence do we have to measure Chrysalis’s overall impact on people and the planet?
You can ask the Chrysalis team about the Seed Case Study details here.
This case study employed various methods to assess the impact of Chrysalis’s curriculum on students. Seed used the Impact Management Project (IMP) framework to characterize the critical effects of Chrysalis’s curriculum on students.
It also used The B Impact Assessment, a tool developed by the non-profit B Lab to help companies assess their overall practices that impact governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. The tool helped in the analysis of observation and assessment data collected by Chrysalis and interviews of Chrysalis staff and key stakeholders including students, teachers, and administrators.
Seed gathered sufficient evidence to identify Chrysalis’s key impacts on stakeholders and student outcome changes based on the assessment.
The results are as follows:
The company had a well above average impact on workers and customers, primarily through education implications and underserved populations.
Using the Impact Management Project (IMP) framework, Seed examined Chrysalis’s performance concerning achieving seven primary student outcomes. The IMP framework helps in identifying five critical dimensions of their impact mentioned below:
- The impact experienced
- Who is impacted?
- How much impact is experienced?
- What is the organization’s specific contribution to the impact vs what would have happened regardless?
- What is the risk that the intended impact may not take place?
The data for child/student engagement, child autonomy, and child thinking reveals positive improvements in student outcomes through interaction with the Chrysalis curriculum.
Students subjected to just one year of Chrysalis’ curriculum as a baseline show an average improvement of 8 per cent across three child engagement metrics. Similarly, an average 12 per cent improvement is seen in child autonomy and child thinking across two shared metrics.
Grade 4 school teacher using Chrysalis curriculum
“It’s clear that students are becoming such creative, deep thinkers. Even though they can’t always write down in perfect English what they think, their verbal responses are deeply thoughtful and unique.”
Chrysalis has recently offered the curriculum to low-income schools. Though this program has been in practice for only one year, it has already been implemented by 244 schools with approximately 1,500 teachers serving nearly 50,000 students. This implies that over 43% of all schools using the Chrysalis curriculum serve low-income students.
Finally, Chrysalis contributes toward SDG 4 by providing targeted teacher training to improve teacher quality and designing the curriculum to ensure quality instruction regardless of baseline teacher quality. Therefore, Chrysalis and its curriculum directly contribute toward “increasing the supply of qualified teachers”.
About Chrysalis
Chrysalis is an education company based in Chennai, India, founded in 2001 by CEO Chitra Ravi. The company’s flagship product - “Schools for Awakening Human Potential” - was first implemented in the 2012-13 school year. Since then, schools’ compound annual growth rates using the program have been over 32%. The compound annual growth of students served by the program is 27%.
Since joining the Seed Transformation Program in late 2018, Chrysalis has added 169 schools and over 40,000 students (the most in any year of the program’s existence). The school count has grown almost 43%, and the student count nearly 37%. Chrysalis currently provides its curriculum to 563 schools, approximately 5,100 teachers, and over 155,000 students in 14 Indian states and one union territory.
Contact here to learn more about the Stanford Seed Case Study or inquire about Chrysalis’s Activity-Based Curriculum.
