Feasibility and utility of an executive function

Testing the feasibility and utility of an executive function battery for use with primary school-aged students in Malawi

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004680

Researchers piloted Tangerine’s tablet-based executive function (EF) assessments with 197 students in rural Malawi, replacing older laptop-based methods with a more accessible, tablet format. Nearly all children completed the tasks in under an hour, demonstrating that tablets can deliver reliable cognitive measures even in low-resource schools. This innovation opens the door for large-scale studies on how malaria affects learning and supports evidence-driven strategies to improve education in high-burden regions. By making advanced cognitive assessments portable and practical, Tangerine is helping bridge health and education for lasting impact.

In this report, we aim to explore digital tools that allow for cost-effective, adaptable, usable, timely, and reliable data collection and visualisation to inform decision-making. Digital data collection and visualisation tools have proven to yield reliable results, facilitate inclusion of ethnic and language minority groups as well as students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Such tools can save organisations time and resources during the data collection and visualisation process, minimise errors during data collection, and help to easily share results and collaborate, often without the need for advanced technical expertise. To develop this resource, a market landscape analysis was developed to identify potential tools. From over 50 tools, four were explored in depth to understand how they were used and adapted to different contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. These case studies allow us to evidence the adaptability of the tools to different research needs and highlight the challenges in those implementations.