The largest-ever survey of learning outcomes among school students — covering 25 lakh students — was held across India on Monday, covering all the States of the country.
Students of Classes III, V and VIII from government and government-aided schools were tested for their performance in terms of learning outcomes developed by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in Maths, languages, Sciences and Social Sciences.
Commenting on this exercise — the National Achievement Survey (NAS) — Union Minister of Human Resource Development (HRD) Prakash Javadekar said, “NAS is a transparent and credible exercise done under third party verification.”
The Hindu had first reported on September 12 that the NAS exercise would happen on November 13 and 30 lakh students were expected to participate. Finally, 25 lakh students actually turned up for the test.
“The survey tools used multiple test booklets with 45 questions in Classes III and V related to language and Mathematics, and 60 questions in Class VIII in Mathematics, Language, Sciences and Social Sciences,” said an official press release.
Students from 1.1-lakh schools across 700 districts in all 36 States/ Union Territories took the test.
“More than 1.75 lakh trained field investigators from outside the government education system were engaged to conduct the learning assessment in the country,” said the release. “To ensure fairness of the survey, a monitoring team was constituted which consisted of observers from inter-Ministerial departments drawn from the State governments, national and state observers from education departments and multi-lateral organisations. This monitoring team observed the implementation of the survey in all the districts on the day of assessment.”
District-wise learning report cards will now be prepared on a specially designed software. Analytical reports will also be prepared, with the analysis reflecting disaggregated learning levels. The process is expected to be complete in three-five months, said the release.
The exercise is expected to help identify problem areas and facilitate better planning for the future.
NGO Pratham’s last Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for rural India documented the deficit in learning levels among school children. The proportion of Class VIII students who could solve a three-digit by one-digit division problem was 43.3% in 2016 and that of Class III students who could perform a two-digit subtraction was 27.7%.
