Primary school students in Anantapur district will have the advantage of improving their basic reading and numeracy skills.
The State government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Pratham Education Foundation and Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) for introducing “teaching at right level”, a rigorously evaluated initiative, to improve learning outcomes at primary level. The programme is set to be introduced in 1,700 schools across the district in the first year of the three-year partnership for students of Classes III, IV and V.
The initiative was mandated following the Annual Status of Education Survey which revealed that of the 97 per cent children aged between 6 and 14 enrolled into the schools in the country, half the children in class V could read a class II text or perform a simple two-digit subtraction. While Andhra Pradesh performed better than the national average, significant gaps in the learning outcomes were still persisting. An assessment by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Anantapur revealed that primary school children scored lower in Maths and Telugu than the State average with more children scoring C than the rest of the State. Under the new initiative, the government school teachers would reorganise students of Classes III to V into groups according to their existing learning level (not by grade/standard or age) and conduct appropriate teaching-learning activities for two hours a day, one hour each for Telugu and Mathematics using a specially developed resource kit and teaching manual.
The initiative follows a similar agreement with Isha Foundation wherein students in all schools in Kuppam constituency were being taught using modern teaching methods. Similar projects were also under implementation in Visakhapatnam, Guntur and West Godavari districts.
It enters into three-year partnership with Pratham Education Foundation
and J-Pal
