Working Papers

Paper 1 - ANNUAL STATUS OF STUDENT LEARNING
The Royal Education Council (REC), Bhutan partnered with Educational Initiatives Pvt. Ltd (EI) to carry out the ‘Annual Status of Student Learning (ASSL)’, a large scale assessment study for the school children of Bhutan.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 1


Paper 2 - STUDENT LEARNING IN THE METROS
How well are students in our ‘top’ schools learning? In order to try and understand this, Educational Initiatives (EI) and Wipro Ltd. conducted a research study in the 5 metros – Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore among the 30,000 students from ‘top’ 40 schools in 2006. However the larger goal was to take a critical issue - the quality of student learning - and to try and gain insights about it based, not on opinion or ‘experience’, but on hard data.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 2


Paper 3 – A personalized adaptive learning system for students
Studies conducted by Educational Initiatives (EI) indicate that the problem of poor learning standards affect almost all ’schools for the poor’ – government-run as well as the so-called ‘lowcost private schools.’The problem exists at two levels – one, students are often not developing even the basic literacy skills like reading, counting, etc. Two, the little learning that happens tends to be procedural or ‘mechanical’ learning – students are able to follow taught procedures but have not understood the underlying concepts.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 3


Paper 4 – Student Progress Tracking System
A Student Progress Tracking System (SPTS) is a computerised system to track student progress in both the scholastic and non-scholastic domains across years. The system is built on a comprehensive database of students, teachers, schools and ideally would be accessible at the school as well as at various central levels (group of schools, block, district or state level, etc.) It essentially provides visibility of the holistic development both of individual students, as well as that of groups of students. Thus, SPTS can be very useful both at the level of individual students and from a systemic, educational planning level.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 4


Paper 5 – Interview students to understand their thinking on key concepts
Students observe and experience various things in their day-to-day lives, they formulate their own notions, attribute meanings, and infer various concepts well before they are ‘taught’ to them. These understandings may or may not be scientifically correct. Many times such wrong notions stay with students (us!) throughout school life, unchanged, and even in adulthood. So though we teach and re-teach concepts, persistent wrong notions don’t allow an understanding and internalization of the correct concepts.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 5


Paper 6 – Municipal School Benchmarking Study
Research on education quality provides evidence that the cognitive skills of the population - quality rather than quantity of schooling – are powerfully related to the economic growth of a country. Given this scenario, the need for national level benchmarking achievement studies that provide detailed and granular information and insights into how well our children are learning assume greater importance. They can provide powerful ‘data-driven’ insights into the existing learning gaps - for students to learn better, teachers to teach better, and schools and policy makers to operate more effectively. This study assessed students in urban local body schools of 30 towns of India with respect to specific skills and competencies that they were expected to have acquired.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 6


Paper 7 – Question Making Competitions for Teachers
It is often found that there is a gap between good teaching and meaningful assessment – the fact that assessment could be used as a very powerful tool in reinforcing learning and encouraging concept application orientation in students is mostly not exploited. A nationwide contest that promotes good question-making as a student assessment tool among teachers is therefore a very useful method by which quality of student learning could be enhanced.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 7


Paper 8: Teacher Needs Assessment
A Teacher Needs Assessment (TNA) that identifies common strengths or weaknesses among teachers, provides feedback to individual teachers, and recommends specific system level interventions for teacher improvement assumes relevance in this scenario.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 8


Paper 9: Student Learning Study
Student Learning Study (SLS) is a benchmarking study of student learning conducted by Educational Initiatives (EI), with financial support from Google.org, USA. The study has been carried out in 48 districts in 18 states and 1 Union territory of India. About 1.6 lakh students studying in classes 4, 6 and 8 in 2399 selected government schools were tested (101643 students actually took the tests – the others were absent on the day of testing) and tested in Language and Maths through common test papers in 13 language versions. The study also collected background information from the students, teachers, head teachers and schools to detect relationships between these factors and student learning.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 9


Paper 10: Scale Anchoring
Student Learning Study is the first comprehensive national study of Indian states that attempts to explain the performances in terms of what students know and are able to do at each of the SLS 2009 national benchmarks of achievement – 90th percentile (advanced), 75th percentile (high), 50th percentile (intermediate), and 25th percentile (low). As per global practices followed in international studies such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress In Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the Knowledge and Ability benchmarks in Language and Maths for classes 4, 6 and 8 have been derived using the scale anchoring methodology.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 10


Paper 11: Performance of Indian States – SLS
This working paper is a sequel to the last 2 papers on the Student Learning Study and explores the performance of the different states that participated in the study. Although comparisons of performance are provided in this paper for the purpose of creating cross-learning and remedial opportunities, it is to be noted that the overall learning level of even the best performing states is low and renders much scope for learning improvement.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 11

Paper 12: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is one of the most influential international assessments of student achievement that is conducted every four years since 1995. TIMSS also includes information about key instructional, curricular and resource related variables with reference to the teaching-learning process in Mathematics and Science. Equivalent studies (e.g., Progress in Reading Literacy Study - PIRLS) are also conducted in reading literacy.

The stated aims of TIMSS are to improve the teaching and learning of Maths and Sciences around the world. It provides important information to aid policy development, to foster public accountability and to identify areas of progress or decline in achievement with a view to addressing the concerns for equity.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 12

Paper 13 – Capacity Building for Teachers
Teachers have one of the most demanding vocations in the world and in order to fulfill their important roles with excellence, they need training, motivation as well as regular mental, emotional and spiritual rejuvenation. That educational systems the world over recognise the importance of the teacher is often evident by the resources spent on teacher capacity building. However, the issues often have been about building an effective model and mechanism that would develop and enhance the teachers’ capacity and provide them avenues for professional development. This working paper explores a few innovative international examples and EI’s experiences in enhancing teacher capacity.

EI Working Paper Series – Issue 13