Educational Initiatives (EI) and Wipro Applying Thought in Schools jointly conducted a national level research study to understand how well children are learning in the top schools of our country. Over 32,000 students from 142 leading schools of five metros - Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore participated in the tests conducted between February and April 2006. The November 27th issue of India Today carries a cover story highlighting some of the main findings of the study. Read the rest of this article »

‘Annual Status of Student Learning’ - Assessment of Students

The ‘Annual Status of Student Learning’ study will be an assessment conducted for all students in Bhutan in classes 4, 6 and 8 in Maths, English and Science. EI will design and develop the assessments, drawing upon its expertise in conducting the ASSET test and in conducting large scale assessments in different languages across various states of India. The tests will measure how well students are learning in Bhutanese schools. This test will try to gauge children’s performance on learning with understanding, critical thinking and problem solving skills, though carefully designed and refined questions. The tests will also benchmark the performance of students in Bhutan with international performance to understand how they compare globally.

Bhutan - Teacher Assessments
Teacher assessments are researched and developed for teachers teaching academic subjects in classes K-12. These tests are designed to understand the conceptual strength the teachers have in their subject areas and their learning gaps. They will also identify the misconceptions teachers may have and provide a basis for understanding the common pedagogical practices followed by teachers in classrooms and their common beliefs about student learning.

World over, governments and citizens alike seem to agree that good quality education is one of the most powerful factors that can improve the quality of life. While education in the past meant largely the 3R’s, the needs of the knowledge society call for critical thinking, learning how to learn and problem solving skills to be imparted to students. Improving an education system almost certainly requires a multi-pronged effort. Parallel to these efforts, however, it is necessary to establish some method to objectively measure the level of student learning! Further, this method of measuring student learning must be valid, periodic, external and largely accepted. While the national efforts in India have helped in increasing the percentage of children attending schools, there is a large effort needed to improve quality of student learning.

Currently, Educational Initiatives with Google Org. has embarked on a first-of-its-kind, ambitious and complex exercise to measure learning levels of government school children across 21 Indian states. The project involves assessment of student achievement in classes 4, 6 and 8 and will cover about 21 states and thus about 15 languages(http://google.org/projects.html). The study aims to establish student achievement levels and to provide insights into comparative performances of different states, to create cross-learning and remedial opportunities.

EI developed achievement tests to measure mathematics and language acquisition among primary school children in 13 states of India where UNICEF was carrying out its interventions. The tests were standardised across 9 languages and involved very intricate development cycle involving language experts from all over India, as well as Centre for Indian Languages (CIIL). The papers were developed in Language and Maths for classes 3 and 5. Oral papers and a base-level reading test were also developed for the same purpose. EI was also involved in training the evaluators for administering the test and coding the student responses accordingly. The report has been submitted to UNICEF.

This is an ongoing randomised evaluation study done in partnership with World Bank, Harvard University, Azim Premji foundation (APF) and the Government of Andhra Pradesh (GOAP). It is a longitudinal study across 8 years and covers currently 80,000 elementary school kids in rural AP and measures the impact of teacher incentives vis- a- vis the inputs (eg., block grants, additional teachers). EI is engaged in developing the tests for classes 1-5 in language, maths and EVS.

EI also analyses the student performance in the various treatments as well as develop insights on how a student performs when confronted with items that require mechanical and conceptual understanding. The project also uses advanced statistical models from Modern Item Response theory. The project is in its fourth year and has assessed about 100,000 students till date.

EI is also helping GOAP build capacity through workshops for the Andhra Pradesh teachers and resource persons from the Education department. These workshops are aimed at training teachers to design assessments and use them in the classroom to understand and improve student learning. The teachers are also trained by EI in using the performance data generated from the tests conducted in APRESt.

Status: Ongoing