HONG KONG, March 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Bizibuz, a data-driven learning platform today announced the launch of its KnowYourChild™ tools to help parents bridge educational gaps of their children due to school closures during the pandemic.
School closures have caused large and persistence damage to children’s learning and development. Research shows that 4 months of school shutdowns have put children up to 6 months behind the academic milestones of their cohorts[1] and as remote learning periods extend, the negative consequences are exponential. In particular, younger children have been more negatively impacted than older children as attention spans are shorter[2]. Hong Kong children have been experiencing remote learning for longer than any country studied, currently tallying over 10 months, so the potential learning loss is alarming. A recent report by Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) urges that without immediate action, a Grade 3 child who has lost 1 year of schooling could lose up to 3 years’ worth of learning in the long-run due to poorer engagement, slower social-emotional skill development and missed academic stepping stones[3].
Children need intensive support to get back on track. The first step involves an accurate assessment of the gaps in their development due to remote learning in order to take effective action to help them move past the pandemic and into a successful future.
Bizibuz’s unique KnowYourChild™ tools are a series of benchmarking tools for children of aged 3-12 designed to help parents identify the development gaps, track their child’s milestone achievements, guide on activities to strengthen performance, and monitor the efficacy of activities over time. These tools are developed using advanced algorithms and input from top universities, including The Education University of Hong Kong and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and senior teachers from leading institutions, including the Chinese International School and Canadian International School.
The KnowYourChild™ tools are modeled on the curriculum-agnostic approach of TIMSS and PIRLS by IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), which are international assessments that monitor trends in student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading. This ensures maximum relevancy for parents irrespective of schooling discipline, however the Primary KnowYourChild™ tool is unique in that the subject coverage includes academic and non-academic areas not traditionally assessed such as personal and social development, coding aptitude, financial awareness, visual arts and music predilection, and a first-of-a-kind motor skills assessment.
The tools use a combination of adaptive question paths and an advanced statistical technique called Rasch modeling (typically used in global academic assessments) in order to ensure that a child is not burdened even more by additional unnecessary screentime. The Pre-primary tool (for children aged 3-6 years) can be completed in as little as 5 minutes while the Primary tool (for children aged 6-12 years) takes 10-25 minutes to complete depending on the grade level. A child’s responses are then accurately and reliably converted into benchmarked performances that yield comprehensive multi-page reports for parents covering up to 5 subjects and 40 detailed domains for the Pre-primary tool and up to 11 subjects and 37 detailed domains for the Primary tool.
Parents can then use the report findings and activity recommendations to optimize their decisions on extracurricular courses that are designed to specifically address the gaps in their child’s development or foster their hidden talents. The activity recommendations are interactive and when clicked, lead a parent to our course search portal which currently contains more than 50,000 activities from over 70 top-tier education centers, covering arts, languages, music, sport, STEM, life skills, social sciences, exam preparation, and early childhood (stats which are growing every day).
The Bizibuz platform also automates the management of these extracurricular activities, allowing parents to book, pay, schedule, and even re-schedule their activities instantly on one smart platform. Parents can conveniently track and manage all supplementary learnings, including automating class absences and cancellations in real-time with a click of a button rather than contacting the education center. And the platform’s escrow feature ensures that all bookings carry a money-back guarantee to compensate parents if the education center closes. Bizibuz is the first solution that integrates data-based decision support tools for parents to optimize their child’s development while also assisting with the end-to-end enrolment of those extracurricular courses, an integration which makes the objective monitoring of the outcome of those activities on the child possible for the first time.
“COVID-19 has induced the largest remote learning experiment in history,” affirmed Cristy Almeida, founder & CEO of Bizibuz. “Hong Kong children have been experiencing school closures periodically since as early as 2019. As a mother of two children, I totally understand the frustrations of parents and the pain of rescheduling admin. That’s why we set out to build an automated all-in-one platform and why we want to offer KnowYourChild™ tools for free to guide parents through such uncertainty, and to give our children the opportunity to complete the learning they should have.”
Please go to KnowYourChild™ to further explore a child’s developmental progress and activity recommendations to address gaps in learning.
Learn more www.bizibuz.com
About Bizibuz
Bizibuz is a data-driven learning platform reshaping the education ecosystem by using machine learning and algorithmic processes to optimize parents’ decisions regarding activity selection and to automate end-to-end enrolment.
Through our KnowYourChild™ tools, we are able to guide parents on their child’s proficiencies and milestone development, deliver tailored activity recommendations and track the impact of those activities on their child’s development. We help parents search and filter activities in order to find the classes with the best fit for their child, and allow them to automate the scheduling, payment and rescheduling of those activities instantly on one portal.
Bizibuz has onboarded over 50,000 high-quality courses offered by top-tier education centers, such as Kids’ Gallery, PhD Scientists, and the La Liga Football School.
For more information, please visit www.bizibuz.com.
