Large Scale Assessment

The Large Scale Assessment (LSA) team at EI, looks after large scale testing and educational research projects.

Partners and Clients

LSA works with several State governments in India; Royal Government of Bhutan; funding agencies such as World Bank, UNICEF, Michael Susan Dell Foundation and Hewlett Foundation; CSR initiatives of corporates such as Google, Wipro and Torrent; large and small NGOs in India. Nearly 15 lakh students and 10,000 teachers have taken the assessments carried out by LSA.

Focus Areas

LSA carries out large scale benchmarking studies on student learning outcomes and teacher needs across countries and regions. These studies are diagnostic in nature and pinpoint learning gaps, misconceptions, strength and weaknesses, in student learning achievements at the systemic level, to aid policymakers. Schools, teachers and students are given actionable feedback for improvement in these studies.

LSA also conducts impact assessments through baseline and end line studies, for several educational interventions. The group also provides training support in areas such as Continuous and Comprehensive evaluation.

LSA follows rigorous methods to develop the assessment tools which include in-depth textbook analysis and curriculum mapping, developing and pre-testing test items and getting external experts from the field to comment on the tools before finalizing and implementing the tests. LSA has the proven ability to conduct tests in multiple languages through sensitive handling of translation and cultural context issues.

Many of LSA’s projects are in multiple languages – the recent ‘Student Learning Study’ supported by Google covered 19 states and 14 languages. LSA uses sophisticated techniques such as modern test theory (IRT), scale anchoring, multivariate techniques like regression and multi level modelling, etc to analyse data and to draw insights. The team also specializes in carrying out standardised administration of the large scale testing programs.

Research into how children think and understand specific concepts are also explored in multiple projects, through student interviews, in different parts of the country and in many languages. Topics such as understanding the different aspects of learning environments in providing quality in education, IRT research such as Vertical Scaling - are being researched by the team. The team publishes articles regularly in research forums and shares working papers with stakeholders in the educational domain.