Inside EI

Principal Seminar in Dhaka

EI organized a one day Principal seminar in Dhaka on 7th of August. The seminar was aimed at sharing the ASSET team’s experience of working with over 3000 private schools and 20000 public schools all over India and the Gulf, Singapore and Malaysia over the past nine years.

Around 35 well known educationists from leading schools across Dhaka and Chittagong participated in the seminar. Mr. Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director EI, and Mr. Bidhan Sarkar, Head, International Sales were the key speakers. Mr. Sridhar spoke about the journey of EI, the quality of questions of ASSET and how that leads Teachers to think of how a concept works. He also demonstrated how learning gaps in classroom are revealed in the answering patterns of children. A short video film on children’s responses to simple but key concepts provided valuable insights to the educators present. Discussion followed on how to utilize ASSET as an effective teaching aid. Mr. Bidhan Sarkar, Head, International Sales, EI, made the concluding presentation to the distinguished gathering. Mr. Sarkar’s discussion hinged on the deeper engagement with schools that EI envisions and how several schools are already using ASSET to embark upon several initiatives that help them improve.

Both sessions were highly interactive with the participants drawn into meaningful discussion about the current educational system and how educators could significantly contribute to improving learning standards among children as early as in the formative years. Mrs. Anjali Mittal, Educational Advisor, Bangladesh who organized the event on behalf of Educational Initiatives was MC for the event.

Overall, the feedback received from all the delegates at the seminar showed that it was a very good and enriching experience for all those who attended and for the EI team as well.

News

Shortage of 1.2 million teachers in India: Kapil Sibal

There is a shortage of 1.2 million teachers in India and states must speed up the recruitment process to bridge the gap, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said.

“We have a shortage of 1.2 million teachers. In some states there is an enormous backlog from last several years. In Bihar about 100,696 posts are vacant,” Sibal said.

Sibal said there was a need to speed up the recruitment process.

“In some states, we have found that all deployment (of teachers) is done in one school while there are no teachers in others. We need to redeploy teachers so that there is equal distribution of teachers,” he said.

He voiced concern over the lack of enough quality institutions to train teachers.

“The problem is that not enough students are going for Bachelor of Education (BEd) course, and we also lack quality training institutions, which is adding to the problem,” he said.

Sibal said there was a need to make the profession of teaching attractive by giving incentives like insurance, housing and healthcare facilities.

“Across the world, the best minds opt for teaching profession but this is not happening in India. So we need to give them more incentives,” he added.
Source:

India to host Asian science camp

Scientists and students from across the world will participate in an Asian Science Camp organized in India for the first time from Aug 17-19, an official said.

The Asian Science Camp aims to enlighten talented science students through discussions and dialogue with top scholars of the world.

“Eleven world renowned scientists from India and abroad, including Nobel Laureates Prof. Richard R Ernst (Switzerland) and Prof. Makoto Kobayashi (Japan) will be the speakers at the camp,” said H.C. Pradhan, director of the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education.

Over 200 science students and 30 teachers from more than 20 countries of Asia will be participating in the three-day event, he said.

This is the first time that the science camp is being held in India. The previous ones were held at Taipei (2007), Bali (2008) and Ibaraki, Japan (2009).

Source: IANS

Knowledge Series

The Creativity Crisis
For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

How Creative Are You?

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars-first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar-have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist-has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America from kindergarten through sixth grade for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula from science to foreign language was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs curricula driven by real-world inquiry for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.

The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. “Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

So what does this mean for America’s standards-obsessed schools? The key is in how kids work through the vast catalog of information. Consider the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio. Mindful of Ohio’s curriculum requirements, the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.

Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?

Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.

Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

Having studied the childhoods of highly creative people for decades, Claremont Graduate University’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and University of Northern Iowa’s Gary G. Gute found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible and flexibility helps with creativity.

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity not having loads of it is the real risk factor. In his research, Runco asks college students, “Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.

In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.

When he was 30 years old, Ted Schwarzrock was looking for an alternative. He was hardly on track to becoming the prototype of Torrance’s longitudinal study. He wasn’t artistic when young, and his family didn’t recognize his creativity or nurture it. The son of a dentist and a speech pathologist, he had been pushed into medical school, where he felt stifled and commonly had run-ins with professors and bosses. But eventually, he found a way to combine his creativity and medical expertise: inventing new medical technologies.

Today, Schwarzrock is independently wealthy, he founded and sold three medical-products companies and was a partner in three more. His innovations in health care have been wide ranging, from a portable respiratory oxygen device to skin-absorbing anti-inflammatories to insights into how bacteria become antibiotic-resistant. His latest project could bring down the cost of spine-surgery implants 50 percent. “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ”Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.
Source: News week
parkertrees.pdf

Inside EI

Sudhir Ghodke, Director EI to join speakers from Harvard

Mr. Sudhir Godhke, Director EI, along with Kailash Satyarthi, president of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and Kiran Bir Sethi, Founder of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad will be joining the speakers from Harvard University, the European Commission, 10 Downing Street and Microsoft at the Education Project 2010.

The event is initiated by Prince Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince of Bahrain and Chairman of EDB. The event is from October 8 to 10. For details, visit: www.educationprojectbahrain.org

News

UID body to monitor the education system

The Union government is in discussions with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to enrol students in the programme from the day they enter school.

The effort will help monitor the education system, speed up and smoothen the grant and repayment of student loans and track millions of school and college dropouts.

The human resource development (HRD) ministry has already had two rounds of consultations with Nandan Nilekani, chief of the unique ID programme, in the last three months on making it mandatory to enrol around 250 million students in schools and colleges across the country, according to the ministry.

The benefits for the student community will be manifold, HRD minister Kapil Sibal said on Tuesday in New Delhi.

“A student’s entire educational record will be linked to the UID number and a bank will not have to worry about the chance of any forgery in certificates or false claims on educational qualifications,” said a ministry official close to the development, requesting anonymity. “This will speed up the process and at the end it’s the students who will not get hassled.”
Student loan repayments can start as soon as the borrower gets employed as all records will be linked to the UID.

According to HRD ministry data, 9% of 12 million students pursuing higher education have taken study loans. The total outstanding on such loans in the year to March is Rs32,000 crore, according to the Indian Banks Association.

The government can use the UID to monitor the education system and put a number to parameters such as school dropout rates. The ID programme will include photographs, fingerprints and iris scans.

“The fingerprint and iris change up to 18 years of age, hence the parents’ biometric identity proof will be kept as a foolproof measure,” said the official cited above. “Once a student turns 18, the biometric prints and photo will be taken as the final one for future use.”

According to ministry data, 25.5% of primary (classes I-V) school students drop out every year. Between class I and class X, this widens to 56.8%—more than half the students who start school don’t finish class X.

Currently, 237 million students are in the Indian school system till the 12th standard, with around 136 million of them in primary schools (Class-I-V), official data show.

The system may help stem the dropout rate, especially among poor students who are forced to opt out because they can’t pay the fees, said Pabitra Banerjee, programme head of the Smile Foundation, a voluntary organization working in the education sector.

The government estimates the number of children missing school at 8.1 million, but the number could be three times as much, said Banerjee.

“Clubbing the UID with the Right to Education Act can really be a major push for universalization of education in India,” he said.

The unique ID could also curtail the chance for wrongdoing, such as teachers signing up at multiple educational institutes to meet accreditation requirements.

First Advantage Pvt. Ltd, a background screening firm, found at least 15% of resumes checked last year contained false information, Mint reported on 25 March.
Source:livemint.com

CBSE introduces new courses

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has introduced three new courses for the current academic session 2010-11 for class XI and XII students. These include Mass Media Studies (academic/vocational), Geospatial Practices (vocational) and Hotel Management and Catering Technology (Vocational).

A MoU to offer Hotel Management and Catering Technology courses in CBSE schools was signed between the National Council for Hotel Management & Catering Technology (NCHMCT) and CBSE recently. 26 CBSE schools have opted for this vocational course, which has started as a pilot project.

These schools include Kendriya Vidyalayas, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, schools of Delhi Government and schools of Central Tibetan School Administration.

CBSE and NCHMCT will jointly certify the programme. The agreed format between the two shall be used for reflecting marks/grades as the case may be, obtained by the student in examinations conducted by CBSE. Also, the CBSE shall finalise the matters of course design, updation, training of teachers, skill development of students, conducting practical and theory examinations etc in consultation with NCHMCT whenever required.

The course in mass media studies will be offered in 20 schools as of now, and CBSE has tied up with Whistling Woods International for this course. Similarly, it has tied up with Rolta India Ltd for the Geospatial Practices course, which will be offered in 13 schools, to begin with. These private partners will provide not only the curriculum support to CBSE but will also impart training to teachers.

Source:Times of India

Knowledge Series

Confident teachers help tiny tots gain more skills

Teachers with higher confidence levels help pre-schoolers gain more language and literacy skills, a new study says.

However, in some cases, students only saw gains when their teachers also had classrooms that emphasised emotional support for the children.

“Emotionally responsive relationships between teachers and children may be the way by which the self-efficacy of teachers can have a positive influence on children’s literacy,” said Ying Guo, the study co-author.

Guo is a postdoctoral researcher in education at the Ohio State University, whose study was published in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education.

She and her co-authors examined how teachers’ confidence, what researchers refer to as “self-efficacy”, affected children’s learning progression in language and literacy skills, says a Ohio state release.

The research involved a large, multi-state study that included 67 teachers and 328 of their students. Participants were followed over the course of 30 weeks.

Teachers were given a short questionnaire that measured their self-efficacy on a scale from one to five.

The level of emotional support in the classrooms was measured by trained coders. They rated the quality as low, mid, or high based on a numbering scale from one to seven.
Students were given tests of language and literacy skills at the beginning and end of the 30 week period to assess improvement.

Results indicated that students whose teachers had high self-efficacy showed gains in one measure of early literary skills called print awareness, in which students were asked questions like “Show me just one letter on this page.”

However, children only showed gains in vocabulary knowledge skills when they had a classroom that offered emotional support in addition to having a teacher with high self-efficacy.

Indian Scienctists

mathformulas.pdf

Register for AQAD through - School

You can choose this option, If your school is participating in ASSET in this current academic year. You need to enter your school code to register for AQAD. The school code can be obtained from the ASSET Coordinator of your school.

Register for AQAD individually
You can choose this option if your school is not participating in ASSET in this academic year and it will be a paid service.

Inside EI

Enabling Quality Education – not just schooling – for all children: Making the ‘Right to Education’ work in practice”

A national conference was held on June 28th in Delhi for “Enabling Quality Education – not just schooling – for all children: Making the ‘Right to Education’ work in practice”.
The audience consisted of 47 delegates from 11 state governments, 9 NGO’s working on education, 5 CSR arms of corporates, 3 international donor agencies and the rest from other partner organizations/individuals.

The session began with opening remarks from Prof. Srivastava who spoke about different attributes of quality education. A panel of external speakers – consisting of Binay Pattanayak (UNICEF -who was also the moderator), Parth J Shah (Centre for Civil Society), Ramya Venkataraman (McKinsey) and Preetha Bhakta (Naandi Foundation) - presented their respective viewpoints on the importance of measurement in ensuring quality in a panel discussion that followed.

From EI, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director, Vyjayanthi Sankar, Vice President - Large Scale Assessment and Sandeep Saha, Vice President - Strategic Relationships spoke on ensuring quality education focus in RtE, student learning assessment as quality measurement tool and Mindspark as a remedial support tool. All the sessions were appreciated by the audience in the feedback.

Towards the end, time was set aside for an open forum discussion where many state representatives shared their progress in formulating draft model rules for RtE at their individual state levels. Interestingly, many mentioned verbally and in their feedback comment that they would work towards include quality aspects of education in the draft model rules for their state. Some NGO’s spoke about their experiences in working towards this cause. In their feedback, many states have also mentioned their interest in carrying out post-assessment dissemination workshops and capacity building of their staff in this area.

News

Students soon can opt for subjects from multiple disciplines together

Can a student opt for subjects like Physics, Economics and Sanskrit together at Class-XII or under-graduation level?

Such multi-disciplinary subject combinations, which have been denied to students in most of the state boards and universities, could be a reality soon.

The HRD Ministry wants to give students the flexibility of having multi-disciplinary subjects from streams of Science, Arts and Commerce together at Class-XI, XII and graduation.

The move has been initiated by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal who has been insisting on making education more student centric and promoting creativity.

The ministry has set up a ten-member panel, headed by S. C. Khuntia, Joint Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, to suggest on allowing flexibility in subject combinations to students at senior secondary and graduation level.

CBSE Chairman Vineet Joshi is the member convener of the committee which will submit its report by September this year, a senior CBSE official said.

The matter was discussed at a meeting of vice chancellors and school principals held here on January 27 this year.

At present, students are able to study subjects of science, commerce and social science together at Class-XII level in certain boards like CBSE and ICSE. However, such combination is not allowed by the state boards.

Similarly, universities mainly allow students to either prefer Science, Commerce or Arts streams at graduation level. Students are not able to pursue multi-disciplinary subjects together.
The committee will also suggest mechanisms for comparing results of students under different boards.

This step assumes significance as experts feel there is huge discrepancy in the evaluation and examination systems of different boards, the official said.

There are allegations that competency level of students securing same percentage of marks in different states is not necessarily equal.

The committee will study the evaluation and examination systems of different boards and suggest mechanisms for inter-board comparability of results.

Introduction of core curriculum at Class-XI and XII and national level entrance test for under-graduate programmes will be among the other issues before the committee.

Introduction of grading system and Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluations at Class-XII will also be looked into by the committee.

Other members of the committee are Joint Director – NCERT, Secretary General-Council of Boards of School Education in India, Vice Chairman-UGC, Director-IIT Kanpur, Chairperson – Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board, Principal Secretary (School Education)-West Bengal government, S. Sathyam – former secretary to Government of India and H. S. Srivastava – former HOD, NCERT.
The Hindu

Getting your maths right

If you can’t divide 300 by 2, should you qualify for a loan? That is one of the questions raised by a new study led by a Columbia University assistant business professor, Stephan Meier, who found that borrowers with poor math skills were three times more likely than others to go into foreclosure.

Meier conceded that the results were not shocking, but he said he had not expected the connection between math skills and mortgage default to be so pronounced.
340 borrowers in survey

About 340 borrowers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island who took out subprime loans in 2006 and 2007 were surveyed in 2008. None were in foreclosure.
The respondents were asked five questions, with the first requiring borrowers to divide 300 by 2, and the second to calculate 10 percent of 1,000. (Since the survey was conducted by telephone, the questioners did not know who was using a calculator.)

About 16 percent of the respondents answered at least one of the first two questions incorrectly. Meier said that the results were consistent among all levels of education and income.

Over all, 21 percent of the respondents whose math abilities placed them in the bottom quarter of the survey experienced foreclosure, versus seven per cent of those in the top quarter.

Meier said the fact that the borrowers in the sample had subprime loans — which in 2006 and 2007 were given even to those with dismal financial histories — did not lessen the significance of the findings.

A larger survey in Britain, he said, found nearly the same levels of math illiteracy among those questioned about retirement savings. Meier said the study had at least two implications for mortgage lenders. “Maybe start adding math tests to the process,” he said, “and screen them away.”

The other alternative, he said, would be working to help borrowers improve their financial literacy before they took out the loan.

“There are a lot of financial decisions you have to make as a homeowner,” he noted, “but some of the more difficult decisions have to do with how to rebudget if you’re hit by an income shock, which a lot of people had to do during the recession.”

Mortgage lenders, brokers and counsellors mostly agree that it’s difficult to gauge a borrower’s math skills under the current mortgage-application system. “A lot of payment numbers are discussed,” said Richard L Tracy Jr., the chief executive of Campbell Mortgage in West Haven, Conn., “but by that time the computer programs have already done the math.”

Tracy said that although he believed financial literacy and math skills were important predictors of a borrower’s ability to pay, borrowers deficient in those respects would most likely also have weak credit scores.

Jacqui Atcheson, a senior loan officer with Prospect Mortgage of Sherman Oaks, Calif., said that she worked closely on budgeting possibilities with any borrower whose credit history was checkered.

She added that she would not offer a loan to a borrower she found lacking in the mathematical or financial skills needed to pay it back, even if the borrower could qualify for a mortgage.

Eileen Anderson, a senior vice president of the Community Development Corporation of Long Island, a nonprofit housing organisation, says her group counsels struggling borrowers through the foreclosure-avoidance process.

“Many of them don’t understand how to do a budget — which is basic math, I guess,” she said.

Borrowers who receive prepurchase buyer education are less likely to end up in foreclosure than those who do not, she added.

“In our programs,” Anderson said, “we’re doing the math with them, not for them.”
And better-educated borrowers are not exempt, either. “People say they’re doctors, so they don’t really need it,” she said. “So what? We see doctors who took out loans they didn’t understand, and who are in foreclosure now.”

Deccan Herald

Knowledge Series

Confident teachers help children learn more

“Emotionally responsive relationships between teachers and children may be the way by which the self-efficacy of teachers can have a positive influence on children’s literacy,” said Ying Guo, study co-author and postdoctoral researcher in education, Ohio State University (OSU).

Guo and her co-authors examined how teachers’ confidence in their teaching abilities affected children’s learning progression in language and literacy skills.

The research involved a large, multi-state study that included 67 teachers and 328 of their students. Participants were followed over the course of 30 weeks.

Teachers were given a short questionnaire that measured their self-efficacy on a scale from one to five. The survey asked questions like “How much can you do to get through to the most difficult students?” and “How much can you do to keep students on task on difficult assignments?”

The level of emotional support in the classrooms was measured by trained coders who coded how teachers and students interact with each other from videotapes collected during an approximately two-hour standardised classroom observation.

The coders rated the quality as low, mid, or high based on a numbering scale from one to seven. Students were given tests of language and literacy skills at the beginning and end of the 30 week period to assess improvement.

Results indicated that students whose teachers had high self-efficacy showed gains in one measure of early literary skills called print awareness, in which students were asked questions like “Show me just one letter on this page.”

However, children only showed gains in vocabulary knowledge skills when they had a classroom that offered emotional support in addition to having a teacher with high self-efficacy.

“Classroom quality is important, and students seem to learn more when they have emotional support in the classroom,” Guo said.

The study found that some of the factors that affected teachers’ self-efficacy were certification degree and years of experience.

Teachers who possessed an elementary certification had higher levels of self-efficacy than those who possessed a pre-school certification, said an OSU release.

While the data from this study can’t explain why, the researchers speculate that the additional training needed for an elementary certificate may have led these teachers to be more confident in their teaching abilities than those with pre-school certification.

The study was published in a recent issue of Teaching and Teacher Education.