In Zimbabwe, the lockdowns prompted by COVID-19 caused learners to miss an average of six learning hours per week. Following this impact, the Higherlife Foundation introduced a digital learning program called the Growing Tree Model (GTM) to help foundational learners improve their literacy and numeracy skills with a specific focus on English writing, English reading, and mathematics. To evaluate whether there has been an improvement in their performance following the intervention, this study was quasi experimentally designed by pairing and assessing pre-and-post-intervention scores of 145 learners. The paired samples assessment revealed that the GTM led to a 7% and 8% improvement in learners’ English reading and mathematics performance, respectively. In contrast, their performance in English writing declined by around 2%. The results suggest that the GTM led to a statistically significant improvement in learners’ performance in English reading and mathematics only, explained by a p-value of less than 0.05 (p<0.05) in these two intervention constructs. It is, therefore, recommended that the: education ministry support the development and uptake of digital learning platforms beyond the crisis period; and, if possible, partner with the Department of Social Welfare to train caregivers on basic knowledge of early childhood development and operationalizing digital learning platforms since most of them facilitated learners in having growing tree lessons yet they are not skilled in that area. Furthermore, the teaching approaches for English writing in the GTM can be refined since the platform led to a decline in learners’ performance in that intervention construct. This paper contributes to pedagogical literature on the intersection between foundational learning, digital educational tools, and learning under non-ideal conditions by showing what worked and what failed to work in the context of the GTM.
