Mint, March 7, 2008

Ahmedabad-based learning assessment company, Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd, has received an undisclosed amount of first round funding from Bangalore-based Footprint Ventures, Chennai-based IFMR Trust and Maryland, US-headquartered Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Ballarpur Industries Ltd chairman Gautam Thapar has also invested in this company in his personal capacity.

“We found it interesting that the company offers pen-and-paper assessment exams, which can reach out to a huge market and cut across all socio-economic sectors,” says Josh Bornstein, executive director, Footprint Ventures, who will take a board seat with the company. He did not reveal the amount invested, but said it was an early-stage deal. The firm typically invests $1-5 million (Rs4-20 crore) in a company.

For investor Novak Biddle, this is the first direct investment in India. It has previously invested in education-centric US-based companies such as Spectrum K12 School Solutions Inc. and Intelliworks Inc.

The IFMR Trust invests in commercial opportunities to leverage the competitive strengths of low-income households in India with an emphasis on those that are living in remote rural locations of the country.

It plans to implement this through a dedicated fund—a Rs600 crore IFMR Trust’s Network Enterprises Fund that invests in multiple sectors, including a national rural financial services channel.

Education is emerging as a key investment sector for venture capitalists in the country. In the last six months, several companies in this space, such as Bangalore-based TutorVista Education India Pvt. Ltd, Mum-bai-based Hurix Systems Pvt. Ltd and 24×7 Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd, have together received funding of more than $12 million.

Educational Initiatives, the latest addition to this list, was founded by a group of alumni from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, who had earlier started the Ekalavya Education Foundation in Ahmedabad.

The six-year-old company offers students assessment exams to judge their learning skills rather than rote knowledge of the subscribed syllabus, such as logical reasoning and ability to think independently. “We want to help private and public schools understand student learning better, in a non-threatening and objective way,” says Sridhar Rajagopalan, managing director, Educational Initiatives.

It targets students between classes III and X through part¬nerships with schools. It has tied up with 1,300 English-medium schools so far and aims to reach out to 3,000 by the year-end. It that will set up office in Delhi this - year and plans to fund new products and expand its reach.

Footprint, which led the deal, had earlier invested in Travis Internet Pvt. Ltd, which runs online bus ticketing site Ticketvala.com, and co-invested with venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in on-line digital photography company Canvera Digital Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

DNA Academy, January 15, 2008
Everyday we make decisions and act on the information that comes in, and what we already know. But making a decision without weighing the facts could mislead us. A critical thinkers makes productive decision without any misconception

Critical thinking refers to a collection of overlapping mental activities of intuiting, clarifying, reflecting, connecting, inferring, judging, and so on. It brings these activities together to evaluate the credibility; quality impact, significance, usefulness or desirability of an entity on the basis of an implicit or explicit value system and a set of criteria of evaluation. Students are unaware that they have in mind an explanatory hypothesis and that before accepting it as true; they ought to compare it with others.

A CASE STUDY

Students hold intuitive but wicorrect conceptions even after they are given specific information designed to address certain misconceptions. For instance. Educational Initiatives, an organisation run by group of 1IMA Alumni, around 4000 students of class 4 across the country were asked the question on evaporation. 22 per cent students selected the correct answer (Option B) but interestingly half of the 78 per cent who could not select all the correct examples of evaporation think the answer should be Option A. Water changing into water vapour from oceans and rivei-s. These students think that water changing from a glass kept in open cannot be termed as evaporation. 39 per cent of the students thought that only water changing to water vapour from the oceans and rivers is an example of evaporation.

A common misconception was ‘Evaporation is a process that happens only in the presence of sunlight. Some students.also thought that evaporation happens only outdoors while drying can happen anywhere.

ANALYSIS
There are various concepts like evaporation that children learn but are unable to relate them to their day-to-day experiences. A higher order concept like ‘evaporation’ is very well communicated as a phase change process but is explained only with reference to the water cycle. It is important to realise that concepts could be well internalised if seen in the light of several meaningful and practical situations. Drying and evaporation are the same. So what really happens when water evaporates? Water turns into a gaseous state when the molecules acquire a certain amount of energy, sufficient enough to overcome the intermolecular forces. Molecules of water, while moving randomly , collide and in the process, impart energy to other molecules. If the energy of a molecule on the surface is enough to change its physical state it will escape from the surface. This is evaporation.

Students constantly build their own models of various processes based on the simplest logic that convinces them. These models may be scientifically incorrect. And hence it’s important to correct them. On the other hand. It’s important to correct them. On the other hand, it’s not very easy to break their incorrect models unless the illustration given generates a strong conflict with their reasoning. Real life illustrations can help catalyse this process and channelize it in the right direction.

In one of the video series, college students were handed pieces of wood and asked to describe the elemental composition of trees. One by one these “best and brightest” declare that the elements embodied in trees come from water and nutrients in the soil. Not one mentions carbon or the process of photosynthesis, even when pressed, although all have taken at least on biology course in college.

SKILL TRAINING
Faculty aware of the common misconceptions in their fields can use techniques that force students to confront their misconceptions. For instance, they can ask questions and pose problems that entrap students in particular misconceptions and then ask students to apply what they have learned to a new situation. He then applies his new realisation to the correct understanding of the process of photosynthesis. As can be seen from such examples, it illustrates a typical failure to think critically

Almost everyone agrees that one of the main goals of education, at whatever level, is to help develop general thinking skills, particularly critical thinking skills. But students do not acquire these skills as much as they could and should. The difficult part is knowing what to do about it. Apparently, we need to change our style of teaching. But in what ways? What enhancements would best promote the development of critical thinking skills1′

The first, and perhaps most important lesson is that critical thinking is hard. Although it can seem quite basic, it iti-n tally is a complicated process, and most people are just’not very good at it. The key is hidden behind the little word “skill” Everyone knows that mastering a skill takes practice, and lots of it.

THE CHALLENGES
One of the biggest challenges in learning new skills, particularly general skills such as critical thinking, is t he problem of transfer, in a nutshell, the problem is that an insight or skill picked up in one situation is not, or cannot he. applied in another situation. For example, if someone has just learned how to calculate the per-kilogram price for packaged nuts, they should then be able to calculate the per-kilogram prtce for packaged chips; if they cannot, we would say that the learning has failed to transfer from nuts to chips.
THE IDEAL CRITICAL THINKER
- Puta extra effort into searching for and attending to evidence that contradicts what he/she currently believes.
- When”weighing up” the arguments for and against, gives some “extra credit” for those arguments that go against her position.
- Cultivates a willingness to change her mind when the evidence starts mounting against her.
source:College Teaching

With critical thinking, as with so many other things, the whole is definitely more than the mere aggregate of its parts. Think about tennis, which is a higher-order skill. To be able to play tennis, you must be able to do things like run. hit a forehand, hit a backhand, and watch your opponent,. But mastering each of these things, separately is not enough. You must be able to combine them into the coherent, fluid assemblies that make up a whole point. Likewise, critical thinking involves skillfully exercising various lower-level cognitive capacities in integrated wholes.

Digitallearning. November 2007 issue
An ASSET for Schools
Vaishali Shah (vaishali@ei-india.com), Educational Initiatives, Ahmedabad, India
Educational Initiatives (El), the organisation run by a group of IIMA alumni aims to bring about a significant improvement in the quality of student learning through research-based means with a special focus on assessment. The group wants to accurately measure how well children are learning so that this can meaningfully serve as feedback on how the education system is doing as a whole. About 50% of their effort is focused on private, English medium schools, and the balance on the mass government education system. El works with the World Bank with rural schools in Andhra Pradesh, with UNICEF in 13 states of India, and also with municipal schools of 30 towns of 5 states.

At the heart of El is its focus on “measuring true learning”, i.e., finding out how much children have really understood and can apply from what they have studied in school. The experience of assessing kids over the last 5 years through the diagnostic test ASSET and other studies has repeatedly shown that children even in the best schools in India aren’t learning as much as they should. The purpose of doing this study, or all the studies, is to trigger a debate on the real status of teaching and learning in India, and then play a part in a larger movement for change. In the experience of the founder directors of Eklayva, who are currently the directors at El, there have been innovations in teaching methodology, architecture, infrastructure and educational material. Most schools invest a lot of their time and energy in creating the right physical environment for the children to learn. They also provide a lot of different type of stimuli (in the form of activities, projects etc).But one of most critical links missing is ‘Feedback’.

The current assessment methodology encourages and rewards rote memorisation. A large part of this is due to the structure of the Board exams (some boards are changing their pattern) so the schools also prepare the children accordingly. There is very little time, given the curriculum width and breadth and the shortage of teaching hours to focus on, has the student really understood and can the student use this understanding to apply the knowledge in unfamiliar situations.

It was felt that schools are changing their curriculum to make it more relevant and are adopting a lot of new practices. In such a situation it would be useful for the schools to get accurate, objective and scientific feedback on the extent to which their efforts have been successful.

Over 1000 schools in the country are taking the test every year in India, Middle East and Singapore. Over 2,00,000 students take part in the test every year

The mark based feedback by its very nature does not answer a child/ parent’s question of “WHY” has my child done bad/well and what are the concrete steps that the child/parent should take to ‘IMPROVE’ the child’s achievement level. To answer the above questions, ASSET was developed as an objective, skill-based diagnostic test that would test the understanding and application of concepts that are covered within the school curriculum.

Unlike the conventional system of examination which tests the ability of a student to memorise without application of thought, ASSET diagnoses and conceptualises the understanding of a student. It is prepared on the curriculum of various state boards, CBSE and ICSE and consists of activities, worksheets, experiments and games scientifically designed to strengthen skills. It is a tool to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of each student.

The test is conducted in three subjects English, Maths and Science and Social Studies and Hindi are optional subjects for the students of Class 3 to 10. The uniqueness about ASSET test that it is not a just launched concept. Over 1000 schools in the country are taking the test every year in India, Middle • East and Singapore. These schools see value because it is a test designed for the Indian curricula and the results are useful for taking remedial action. Over 2,00,000 students take part in the test every year.

A lot of technology goes into the analysis of the ASSET results. One interesting technology involves automatic matching and correction of student names allows us to ship the results to schools within 45 days or less. Note that, unlike other tests, ASSET papers are matched for every student, and the student gets a consolidated report across subjects.

For children whose schools are not taking ASSET, the alternative mode is ASSETOnline (www.assetonline.in) - an online version of the ASSET test. ASSETOnline, being the exact same test available on the Internet, makes available all these benefits at the time and place convenient to students. Moreover, unlike the paper based ASSET test, a student can take this diagnostic test herself, who do not have to wait for her school to start offering it. If the school does offer ASSET, it is now possible to practice taking a similar exam before appearing for the test at school! One can monitor the student’s progress more than once a year, by sim-ply going online and taking a new test.

Being an online test, ASSETOnline tests are not taken under uniform supervised conditions. Understandably, individual scores cannot become a measure of competitive performance. Scores however have high diagnostic value when the tests are taken honestly by the student.
The Road Ahead for the Student After children go through the test, a skill profile chart is prepared based on the child’s performance. A check is made on what a child lacks and what are his/her strengths. This further analyses the level of the child’s proficiency in different subjects. A skill-wise analysis gives a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses and helps the student focus on improvement.

The Road ahead for the Teacher
The ASSET team visits schools where the participation has been of a sizable number of students to ensure that the data is statistically valid and conducts a post-ASSET analysis with the teachers. This session aims at increasing the teachers’ familiarity with the analysis and offers teachers a clearly laid out plan of what to do in the year. Suggestions like preparation of a Skill-Book for specific skills chosen for improvement, are given to the teachers.
In addition to the above sessions, the ASSET team organises two-day workshops on “Design and Implementation of a Skill-based Curriculum”. These workshops are aimed at helping the teacher become familiar with cutting-edge theories such as “Understanding by Design” and implement them in their classrooms.

Participating in ASSET
To participate in ASSET, a student has to register through respective school. ASSET is offered to the schools as an option to participate in July or in December. Schools are valuing the feedback and realising that the analysis validity increases if more students participate. Therefore schools like Kumarans, Bangalore, Sishu Griha, Hosur, Gear Innovative are including the test as a part of their curriculum and ensuring that parents are involved in the process so that they also understand the rationale behind the tests. But there are schools that make the test optional also. A lot of schools have appreciated the clarity and usefulness of the analysis and are fully supporting the programme. The growth of ASSET in the past three years from 14 schools in December 2001 to more than 1000 schools in December 2007 is an indicator of its wide acceptance across CBSE, ICSE and State board schools.

Features
For students of classes 3-10
• Core Subjects: English, Maths and Science
• Optional Subjects: Social Studies and Hindi
• Based on the Indian curriculum (CBSE, ICSE and state boards)
• Detailed Skill-wise feedback with customized letter for every student
• Conducted in the school during school hours
• Schools choose to take the test in Summer (July-August) or Winter (December)

Feedback from Students and Parents

Student: Meghana Harikumar, Class 9, Bangalore International Public School, Bangalore
1 am very happy to appear such an educative test.The questions asked are fantastic.The answer paper is designed really beautiful. I request you to conduct the same test for standard 10. As I am studying in standard none, I am really excited to write such competitive examinations.

Parent: Sarita Sikaria (meghapolytop@vsnl.net)
My son has sat recently for Class 4 Assets test in Guwahati.This was his first such test and I was very impressed with the math and science papers - they really tested the child’s grasping power of the subject. However the English paper was heavy, as per their curriculum in school. Maybe central board students are more efficient at such papers, but not state boards.

Parent: D.SRIHARI (alphanet@sify.com)
This is with reference to your Assessment of Scholastic skills through educational testing at M/s SHISHUGRIHA school at Bangalore.While I am very happy at the method used to test the skills of children, I am very much impressed at the feedback given to every child to test and improvement in particular subject and areas of improvement. My son has already started improving in such areas. I would like my son to go through such tests time to time.

Parent:T Subash, Chennai (subiS9@yahoo.com)
The quality of test conducted and assessment afterwards are something to be admired at the highest level. I will be happy if student report includes the school’s performance on all India ranking.The other things is, when you conduct the test again you should be able to compare with previous ranking, for the student and the school.

Power of ASSET
The power of ASSET does not end with detailed feedback and benchmarking provided to students. It offers many tangible benefits to teachers and schools: it allows SCHOOLS to benchmark themselves against the best and identify areas requiring improvement

• it provides TEACHERS insights into where exactly their students are weak compared to the national average or another section or school it allows SCHOOLS to focus on initiatives like teacher training in the areas where they are needed the most
it provides concrete ideas to teachers of questions that can be used to improve assessment methods
• detailed skill-training and other workshops are also offered free to schools with ASSET.

LiveMint, August 13, 2007
By Jeetha D’Silva
At the Gundecha Education Academy in suburban Mumbai, students hunch over tables and set coloured plastic blocks on a board. They look like they’re having fun-even though the game is really a les¬son in fractions, courtesy of Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd.

Another classroom nearby enacts a scene at a restaurant: setting tables, taking orders, serving guests. A teacher from Helen O’Grady Children’s Drama Academy India, a franchise that uses drama to teach English coordinates the whole affair.

Students in the lower grades, meanwhile, sit before computers, sing along to familiar melodies, trace letters on the computer screen and read colourful books-curricula designed by the non-profit Waterford Research Institute India, an arm of the US-based Waterford Institute Inc.

As India addresses the shortcomings of a rigid, drill-oriented education system, a revolution has been brewing across the country to shift from rote learning to more creative-even fun-methods. And a fleet of enterprises from non-profits to consultants to education start-ups is rolling out new products and services to assist in the transformation. Often, these businesses brand their educational tools and philosophies, while schools, in turn, market the inclusion and adoption of such innovative techniques to parents.

When she was hired to set up Gundecha Education Academy, Seema Buch said she envisioned it as a place where children could be happy as they learn. Four years later, she says that aspiration has been fulfilled with the help of external organizations that share the same goals.

Generally, the schools pay fees for curriculum, tests and advice; for example, Educational Initiatives (El), founded by graduates of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, conducts a test to gauge each student’s under¬standing of what is taught in the classroom. It charges schools about Rs250 per student for tests in three subjects-mathematics, science and English.

“From a business perspec¬tive, the potential in today’s environment is huge,” says Sunita Joshi, director of JIL Information Technologies Ltd, the IT arm of the Rs 3,500 crore Jaypee Group. “Earlier, schools were reluctant to invest in IT, but now technology has percolated into schools across the country. And the schools are keen to have these kinds of products.”
JIL develops computer-aided teaching modules, such as three-minute videos that break down difficult to understand concepts as the clotting of blood or the continental drift theory. More than 1,000 schools have licenced JIL products.
“Our products are aimed at the teachers who are constrained for time,” says Joshi.
While JIL operates in areas in which schools are increasingly compelled to invest, even Helen O’Grady reports heightened demand for its drama classes from traditional schools grappling with just how to teach students to be more creative.

“We are going in for major expansion as we have requests coming in from across the country,” says Arpita Mittal, executive principal of Helen O’Grady in India, a franchisee of the Australian firm. “Students who participate in the programme become more confident and are able to express themselves lucidly.” The focus, so far, has been urban schools, but in the next phase, it plans to target small¬er cities and towns, even the interior regions of the country.

A recent study by Pratham, an NGO tracking rural education, shows a shift toward private education across the country. While 16.3% of rural children were in private. children were in private schools in 2005, the number increased to 18.8% in 2006.

“It is more critical to go to these schools and give the children there a voice,” says Mittal. Helen O’Grady’s programme offered at schools runs the course of the academic year and schools pay on a per student basis.

The programme was brought to India by Harshkumar Seksaria, a director of Govind Properties Pvt. Ltd. He had seen a programme in session in New Zealand and was so enthralled with the way the children were participating that he decided to launch the programme here. “Now a lot of entrepreneurs want to be part of the initiative. It is quite rewarding, not just as an experi¬ence, but even monetarily,” says Mittal.

Outside the box
While these organizations focus on one aspect of education, others such as El and iDiscoveri Centre for Education and Enterprise cast a wider net. “When we started out, we discovered that children did not find school an engaging experience,” says Anus-tup Nayak, partner at iDiscoveri. “By the time they left school, they had a lot of information, but very fragile understanding.”

Nayak should know. His own moment of truth on his schooling came when he was studying at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

An instructor gave him lots of coloured paper clips and said, “Imagine that these are people going for a movie. Show me the different ways that these people can be seated.” Nayak was stumped.

“I knew the formula for permutations and combinations because I had learnt it in school but I could not demonstrate my knowledge with these clips,” he says.

Today, Nayak and his team, which includes alumni from Harvard and the Indian Institutes of Technology, are working with several schools across the country, including Satya Bharti Schools in Punjab, the Heritage School at Gurgaon and the Yenepoya School at Mangalore.

“Initially, we started working with teachers, focusing on getting them excited and working on their teaching skills, hesays. ‘”In the last one year, we are investing into finding alter-natives to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of learning as we are altering the transaction between the teacher and the student,” says Nayak.

Both iDiscoveri and El have arrived at similar conclusions on the level of comprehension among schoolchildren. Following a survey across schools in five metros, El reported that most students seem to be learning mechanically, and are able to answer questions based on recall or standard procedures. But they are not able to apply what they have learnt to new, unfamiliar problems-indicating that lessons have been memorized, and not understood.

Students have the maximum problems with mathematics and science such as fractions, factors, area versus perimeter, light moving through media, among other concepts.

iDiscoveri attempted to tackle the issue by training 2,000 teachers and 250 principals and leaders across the country. It now plans to create new curricula for classes from kindergarten to class VIII.

For every class, the team maps what students should learn and then translates some of the abstract concepts into a toolkit that brings these concepts to life through enriched teaching techniques, models and a teacher’s toolkit and professional development programme.

Students say they see a difference. Shashank Srivastav, a ninth standard student at Gun-decha Academy, finds the new learning tools “very interesting”. “I can now understand what is taught much faster and more easily,” he says.

The growth or companies catering to education comes, of course, against the backdrop of more schools opening to serve the hunger for education and training. A report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research estimates that nearly a third of the Indi¬an population is in the school-going age, while the middle-income group is growing at 15%. Based on this report, iDiscoveri estimates that urban India alone needs more than 6,500 new schools every year.

iDiscoveri just started three pilot projects where a new curriculum is being tested-the Yenepoya School in Mangalore, the Cambridge School in New Delhi and the iDiscoveri pre-school in Gurgaon.

“Once we have the results of this pilot, we will be able to scale up the programme and offer the new curriculum as well as the toolkits to many more schools. That way we can bring about more concrete changes in the education system,” says Nayak.

Testing times
Despite trying to teach students to train for more than tests, different types of assess-ment also are growing, as schools try to understand what their pupils really know and, importantly, how they stack lip against their peers.

El’s ASSET (which stands for assessment of scholastic skills through educational testing) has been the key factor in driv¬ing the company’s profitability, says its managing director Sridhar Rajagopalan.

ASSET is a diagnostic tool to determine the students’ level of comprehension and application of concepts that are covered within the school cur¬riculum. This year, at least 250,000 students from more than 1,000 schools across the country will take a skill-based diagnostic test.
“In the schools’ efforts to shift from rote to learning by understanding, this makes a good starting point,” says director Sudhir Ghodke.

The test, conducted for classes III-IX, assesses students’ comprehension in mathematics, science and English; Hindi and social science are optional tests. El then evaluates the performance of each student, each class and the school, and provides consultancy on where the school stands on various parameters compared to other schools across the country. Based on this, El conducts programmes for the faculty on how they can improve the learning experience in their schools.

Already, it says it is seeing results.

“We are clearly seeing an improvement in performance among schools that we have been working with for some time,” says El’s Ghodke, adding that demand for the test and services has grown. The company is expected to earn about Rs7.5 crore in revenues this year and is growing at roughly 65-70% annually.

“The company is profitable, without diluting its focus on developing innovative high-quality products,” says director Venkat Krishnan.

The company also plans to launch a digital adaptive self-learning tool-a programme that teaches the child concepts and then tests understanding starting with very simple questions and leading to more difficult ones, while constantly adapting to the child’s level of comprehension-about to enter school trials shortly.

“We expect this to have a huge demand and see it driving revenues manifold in the next three years’ time. ASSET itself is showing very strong growth, nearly doubling in reach every year. We see revenues being at least 8-10 times the current levels in three-four years,” says Rajagopalan.

Social enterprise
Much of the work in transforming education is also being done by NGOs or founda¬tions of business houses. The non-profit Waterford Research Institute has started working with a few schools in India through local franchises and is expanding its services, says Shuchi Mathur, senior manager, operations.

Wipro Technologies Ltd has a fairly active programme dubbed “Wipro Applying Thought In Schools”.

“We have worked with over 1,000 schools starting with teacher training and subse¬quently expanding to complete transformation of schools,” says Vijay Gupta, vice-president of corporate communication at Wipro.

The Azim Premji Foundation has partnered with a few states and is making efforts to change the teaching in government schools. The focus on government schools is an attempt to reach 75% of students in rural India who are studying at government schools, said S. Giridhar, the head of advocacy and research at the foundation.

Like many businesses spon¬soring education initiatives, Wipro’s goals are not purely altruistic. Managers across India have said the country’s education system and focus on testing and memorization has ill-prepared graduates to work in a global economy that re-quires innovation, creativity, even the challenging of authority.

“We want to drive reforms in assessment of learning outcomes of children, by moving from traditional rote learning tests to assessing understanding, analysis and application of knowledge,” says Giridhar.