Effectiveness of a Pedagogical Intervention to Enhance Linguistic Competence in School Students in Panama. Implications for Educational Public Policy

Abstract

This study evaluated the large-scale implementation of the Digital Intervention for Language & Expression (DILE) to strengthen linguistic competence among lower- and upper-secondary students in Panama. We conducted a quasi-experimental pre-post study (no random assignment) across 40 schools in nine provinces, involving 6,264 students from January to September 2024. Teachers received face-to-face and online training, and the intervention combined multimodal sequences in reading, orality, and writing with explicit teacher mediation. Outcomes included reading comprehension, reading fluency, academic vocabulary, orality, and writing, alongside “dose” and participation indicators (chapters/minutes, comments, reviews). The planned analyses comprised within-student pre-post comparisons, mixed-effects models with random intercepts at the school/province level, effect-size estimation, and adherence checks. Adoption was high: 49,634 chapters were read (≈8 per student), two books were completed, average reading time was 15 minutes per session, and mean quiz performance was eight. Students generated 2,185 comments (coverage 35%) and 778 reviews (12%), with territorial heterogeneity in chapters per student. Findings indicate that DILE is viable at scale and creates robust conditions to estimate its effectiveness on learning. Improvement priorities include increasing students’ productive and interactive activities and strengthening teacher follow-up and feedback, with targeted support in provinces showing lower “dose” of use.