EI featured In ICICI Foundation report-
The Indian Public School System- Time for a Quality Revolution

India’s public school system faces the challenge of providing high-quality education to one of the largest populations in the world. The challenge is big but not insurmountable. Already rapid strides have been made towards universalising access to education. Over the last decade, hundreds of thousands of new public schools have been built and millions of children have been provided with access to schooling.

With increased access to education, the Indian public school system is poised for a transformation. With about 200 million children attending schools, the task is now to ensure that they receive the quality of education they deserve. Leading education experts, government officials and academic researchers recognise the need to take immediate and decisive action towards improving the quality of education. Yet much remains unclear about the specific steps that the country should take in this direction.

To identify a set of initiatives that will help improve the quality of education in public schools across the country, the ICICI Foundation launched a 3-month effort, which involved researching existing material on the topic, conducting field visits, speaking to a range of experts across government, foundations, non-governmental organisations, academics and entrepreneurs. McKinsey & Company assisted the effort by providing global expertise and insights into the Indian education system.

The results of this effort are presented in the report, which describes the imperatives for India in providing high-quality education. This report will be useful not only to policy makers but also to school administrators, NGOs, academics, funding agencies and entrepreneurs, all of whom can make a significant contribution to ensure that the children of our country receive high-quality education.

EI has been featured under the section standardized assessments In ICICI Foundation report- The Indian Public School System-Time for a Quality Revolution. Below is the snapshot of the content

“EI bears various cost components such as designing tests, paying evaluator salaries and publishing and evaluating test papers. Experts point out that the EI tests are distinct from those conducted by other large-scale assessment agencies in three key areas: They are more comprehensive. EI tests assess student competencies in mathematics, English, social and natural science, and general awareness. In addition, they also identify common student misconceptions in these subjects. The tests differentiate between conceptual understanding and rote learning. EI tests are framed so that children’s concepts and application are tested vis-à-vis rote learning of course curriculum. EI uses its own team of well-trained evaluators. EI trains its evaluators in child assessment to gather an in-depth understanding of a child’s competency. EI tests are becoming increasingly popular in the public school system and the organisation has been involved in conducting assessments in various states and school systems. Some of their notable projects include: Nation-wide initiative with Google.org. to measure learning levels of government school children in class 4, 6 and 8, covering about 21 states and 15 languages. Project with the Azim Premji Foundation, World Bank, Harvard University and the Andhra Pradesh Government, to assess 80,000 rural students over a period of 8 years in the state. In addition, EI has assessed nearly 24,000 students in municipal schools across five states: Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal.”

Click here to read full report

Principal Seminars in Ahmedabad

EI strongly believes in sharing its research outputs and keeping a live and strong dialogue with the key stakeholders in education: Teachers, Principals and Schools. The insights that we have gathered about student learning in last decade by conducting assessments of more than 20 lac students across public and private schools were shared with 98 educationists from leading schools across the country during the seminars organized in Ahmedabad in the month of January and February.

Sridhar Rajgopalan, Managing Director EI, Mr. Sudhir Ghodke, Director, Mrs. Deepali Sinha, Educational Advisor and Mrs. Urmila Thaker, Vice President-School Support Services, were the key speakers. Sridhar spoke about the quality of question ASSET has, which make Teachers think of how a concept works and discussion followed on how to utilize ASSET as an effective teaching aid. Sudhir discussed about deeper engagement with schools and how several schools are already using ASSET to embark upon several initiatives that help them improve. He also talked about Digital Adaptive Learning with Mindspark, how it adapts itself based on the responses received and helps a child learn through the interactive process. Deepali got the Principals to share best practices and she shared some of the practices that she has identified in Bangalore schools. Urmilaji shared the Relationship Enhancement Program and impelled the Principals to take the sessions more seriously. Overall it was a very good and enriching experience for all delegates and the EI team.

Right to Education Act now legal from April 1

This bill is just not about taking children to school. This is a bill that speaks about quality education, it speaks about the physical infrastructure, teacher-pupil ratio, qualification of teachers,” Kapil Sibal

Sixteen years after the idea was first mooted, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 has finally been notified, after receiving the assent of the President of India.

Article 21-A, as inserted by the Constitution (Eighty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, provides for free and compulsory education of all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right.

Consequently, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has been enacted by the Parliament.

“This was a matter of national importance for UPA (United Progressive Alliance). This bill is just not about taking children to school. This is a bill that speaks about quality education, it speaks about the physical infrastructure, teacher-pupil ratio, qualification of teachers,” Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal said.

The salient features of the Right of Education Bill are:

- Free and compulsory education to all children of India in the six to 14 age group.

- No child shall be held back, expelled, or required to pass a board examination until completion of elementary education.

- A child who completes elementary education (upto class 8) shall be awarded a certificate.

- Calls for a fixed student-teacher ratio.

- Will apply to all of India except Jammu and Kashmir.

- Provides for 25 percent reservation for economically disadvantaged communities in admission to Class One in all private schools.

- Mandates improvement in quality of education.

- School teachers will need adequate professional degree within five years or else will lose job.

- School infrastructure (where there is problem) to be improved in three years, else recognition cancelled.

- Financial burden will be shared between state and central government.

Source: http://www.indiaedunews.net/

Knowledge Series

What does it mean to educate the whole child?

Amy M. Azzam
Some excerpts from the interview with the co-chairs of ASCD’s Commission on the Whole Child—Hugh B. Price and Stephanie Pace Marshall about what it means to educate the whole child. Price, senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and past president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, and Marshall, founding president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Right now, much of schooling is driven by a utilitarian perspective, a business context. Schooling is designed for a particular end—careers or economic success. Of course, those are important, but they’re not the only reason to educate children. Learning and schooling need to go far beyond the utilitarian, far beyond just serving the needs of a culture and its drive toward economic success. ASCD and the Commission are attempting to start the conversation about children—how to foster healthy, balanced, well-educated children.

Rigorous learning happens when we invite and develop the full range of children’s capacities. We can ground this in Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. For example, say you’re faced with a complex problem that you haven’t seen before. It’s not confined to a neat, disciplinary domain so you don’t know whether it’s a chemistry problem, a physics problem, or a social problem. What is Darfur? What kind of problem is that? Is it a health problem? Is it an education problem? Is it political? Is it judicial? It’s all of these things. When you cut off kids’ ability to bring all these dimensions into problem solving, fundamentally you’re asking kids not to be rigorous. You’re asking them to be simplistic and myopic, to have quick answers, to not engage in what I call conscious weaving—thinking deeply, wisely, and integratively. If you can connect different ideas, if you can integrate concepts from one domain to solve a problem in another, if you can creatively unpack something you’ve never seen before and bring in new ways of thinking to solve a familiar problem—that’s the most rigorous kind of learning.

The point of the whole child initiative is to foster the academic and social development of children. If you don’t attend to some of the nonacademic forces in a child’s life, then it’s going to be difficult for these children to perform academically. Children who don’t come to school in a frame of mind to learn have a hard time performing well in school. The believers of the whole child concept have to show that it tracks through to improved academic performance, but it also shows up in healthier social outcomes, a greater willingness to go to school, higher attendance and graduation rates, and a lower incidence of counterproductive behavior.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, many children are not performing up to their potential. Many of us guess that a lot of emotional and developmental issues are intruding on these children’s ability to achieve.

We began by looking at the issue from a number of perspectives: Are we talking about a partnership? An agreement? A contract? Or a problem? It suggests a promise, between adults and children, between schools and children, between schools and family, between parents and their children, between communities and their schools, between communities and their children.
We’re not breaking new ground when we talk about whole children. We’re born whole. The problem is, of course, that we’re living a fragmented, disconnected, and siloed kind of existence. Kids begin to wonder whether they are being valued or whether only their academic achievement matters.

The whole Child concept is a compact. It is called as compact because supporting the whole child is not the responsibility of schools alone. Schools obviously have a crucial role, but so do communities, parents, and individual teachers. If they all step up to the plate, they can improve children’s prospects for success. If they don’t, it makes it difficult for the other sectors. The first imperative is to recognize that we aren’t just talking about how children perform on tests—we’re also talking about their social and emotional development. Right now, schools are under such pressure related to testing that they can barely breathe when it comes to addressing these other needs. Policymakers need to understand that public policy cannot concentrate on testing alone. Schools need resources for programs in the arts and for counseling and health initiatives.

Community organizations need to play a part. They have to help reinforce the importance of achievement goals, ensure community safety, and provide after-school support. These are the kinds of conversations that need to take place in all communities, across all sectors. If we don’t ensure these supports, we’ll see only marginal gains for children who are on the cusp and little progress for kids who are chronically behind. Reports are coming out now that focus on the need for students in science, technology, engineering, and math, but unfortunately the focus is on “How can we make sure U.S. kids are as competitive as kids in India, China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Singapore?” These concerns are driven by competition. You don’t hear a lot of conversations about what we’re going to do in math and science so that our kids have the tools to advance the human condition. I would submit to you that the primary grounding should be advancing the human condition. When that’s the focus of your scientific, mathematical, and technological work, you’re going to have an economic driver because advancing the human condition takes an enormous amount of creativity, invention, and imagination. What has turned off so many kids—especially girls—to science, engineering, and technology is that we’ve got to be competitive, we’ve got to make money.

The kinds of minds that emerge from a whole child environment are profoundly different. For example, if I take x number of kids whom I don’t know, put them in a room, and give them a messy, ill-structured problem that they have never seen before, I could pick out the kids who have benefited from a whole child environment in school—by how they approach the problem; how they work together; what questions they ask; their level of confidence; their comfort with ambiguity, paradox, and complexity; their ability to fluidly navigate concepts. That’s what success in the 21st and 22nd centuries is going to look like.

We need assessment tools, processes, and mechanisms that get at deep conceptual understanding and integrative ways of knowing, that move kids along a continuum from a novice’s ways of understanding to greater levels of expertise. We need assessment tools that can discern, track, and show growth over time and that show how students solve particular kinds of problems. We have the technology to do it.

The current structure is an input model grounded in memory, transmission, acquisition, one-size-fits-all, compliance, and punishment. It’s grounded in competition and, fundamentally, in fear.
An education for the whole child is different. It’s not simply about learning information and content; it’s about what you do with that information. Every way of knowing is essentially a language. In my institution, I want kids to be multilingual, to speak mathematics and science and poetry and dance and music and art and history. If we don’t invite kids in—inviting their intuition, emotions, and sensitivities—then we’re locking out a huge part of what they can learn. And when we fully engage kids in learning, they become confident, fearless, and able to unpack a problem and resolve it and to work together in groups. We need to look for evidence of that.

Teachers, schools, and communities have to come together to promote this vision of education. They have to ensure, at the earliest levels, that the families of every child in the community have the resources and tools to understand the growing maturation of their child. Years ago, when I was visiting in South America, one country actually had a minister of human intelligence. Part of the work of this minister was ensuring that as soon as a child was born, the mother was given specific materials. Somebody in the hospital worked with the mother and family to help them understand how children develop.

Our communities should do the same. They should ensure that the Whole Child Compact applies to all children, that children have access to health care and access to nurturing. If children are very poor, the community should ensure that they have safe places to grow and develop. The school as community center is a crucial part of this.

Teachers need to reflect on the idea and then band together with their schools and communities to fight for public policies that support it.

I’ve just finished a paper on the lessons that we can learn from the military about how to educate kids who are having a hard time in school and life. Ironically, this program—the National Guard Challenge Program—is more “whole child” than what most schools do. The program focuses on eight core components: health, life navigation skills, academics, citizenship, community service, leadership and fellowship, physical training, and employment skills. What we perceive to be the most rigid of institutions is arguably more flexible than our education system.

Hugh B. Price is Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institution; communications@brookings.edu. Stephanie Pace Marshall is Founding President of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy; spmarshall@comcast.net. Amy M. Azzam is Senior Associate Editor, Educational Leadership; aazzam@ascd.org. For more information on the whole child initiative, visit www.wholechildeducation.org

Interesting Videos

Learn to Change, Change to Learn

Distinguished individuals in education discuss the need for change in the classroom.
Click here to view the video

The Art of Questioning

It is always the teacher who tests the abilities of students? How about creating a platform to showcase teachers’ abilities.

When, what, where, why and how – designing good questions that help to develop critical thinking skills is both an art and a science. A good question has to be creative, interesting, focus on analysis and, most importantly, stimulate the students. Making Application-based question is important to foster knowledge in students who usually memorize the questions at the end of the chapter as a drill. We tried to get teachers to break this monotony and understand the importance of good question-making and imparting knowledge with understanding.

“A good question makes the student think and if framed correctly, it can help the teacher figure out the thought process of the student as he solves the problem. A good question tests the comprehension of a child, rather than just memory or recall,” says Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director of Educational Initiatives (EI).

A creative exercise on good question-making brings the fun back into learning. It provides an opportunity for teachers to create something original. For students, the benefits are manifold. It challenges and stimulates them to think deeper and apply and master the concepts they have learnt.

EI has organised three all-India question-making competition for English medium school teachers. In 2004, 726 teachers from 121 schools participated in the competition while in 2008 there were 2325 participants from 519 schools. 2009 also witnessed an enthusiastic response from more than 3700 teachers from 585 schools. The objective of EI’s ASSET Question Making Competition for teachers all over India is to tap the creative potential of the teaching community. At EI, we believe that teachers should be encouraged to make the right kind of questions as it will help hone their skills in testing as well as deepen their subject knowledge. The objective is to stimulate creative question-making, involve teachers in the activity and recognize and reward their efforts.

Few winning questions of 2009 - Click here to read

QMC Award Ceremony 2009 - Click here to read

Be the change Start with Teacher Plus - Click here to read

Teacher’s Bite

Ms. Daman Dugal,
Former Principal,
Vivek High School, Chandigarh

Importance of Teacher Training and Development in educating students
To learn, to train, to incorporate change is to evolve, to constantly update and thereby upgrade one’s knowledge base. Educators have the onus of gathering relevant information and using pertinent and innovative strategies to disseminate this to the impressionable minds of the young students in their care.

The ability to don many hats and yet maintain the zeal and passion required of a mentor and facilitator is no mean feat. Teacher training programmes serve to encourage teachers to deepen their understanding of their chosen subject and also gain a desired level of efficacy regarding the pedagogical requirements for the same.

It is vital for an educator to have sound knowledge of classroom dynamics as well as the affective and emotional components that govern these. The educator, in his/her role as an effective facilitator has to have an in-depth understanding of the various learning styles to be employed and the multiple intelligences manifested by his students.

Teacher training programmes need to be a priority in the field of progressive education. These programmes serve to augment and strengthen teachers’ effective classroom management skills and proactive teaching approaches.

Mindspark - An Internet-based Computer-Adaptive Learning Program

“I would say its the best way to do mathematics”
-Fenny Herma, S N Kansagra, Rajkot

“The questions are so motivating! they are not like too easy and I can do it very easily. I need to concentrate and it helps me.”
- Pooja Nagaraj, Sindhi High School, Bangalore

“Mindspark rocks!”
- Prajwal Baliga, Innisfree House School, Bangalore

“This is a very good way for polishing our (students) calculations and concepts. It would be wonderful for you to open a site for English.
- Dhriti Jagasheth, The Riverside School, Ahmedabad

Events

Science exhibition at Presidency School, Nandini Layout, Bangalore

The one thing that matters in life is the effort; every good that is worth possessing has to be paid for in strokes of daily efforts, for success is nothing but the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. This spirit of effort was shown on January 10th, 2010 at Presidency School, NLO, when the school organized ‘Prayaas’, its annual science exhibition. The aim of the exhibition was to bring out the hidden talents of the students and enable them to have conceptual clarity, to inculcate a scientific attitude among them to face the challenges of the modern world. The school was packed as parents piled in to see all that ‘Prayaas’ had to offer. Each of our classes had a booth from where each student - right from Grade IV to IX - could explain to our visitors all about what they had been learning and doing in science. The nervous excitement, the enthusiasm and a sense of pride could be clearly seen on the faces of the children as they explained every detail of their projects to the eager parents. Science Department, Ms. Sonia, from the Computer Department, and also the other teachers for the tremendous effort that they had put in along with the children to make the show a grand success. The other dignitaries present were Mr. Thangadurai, the Director for the Presidency Group Schools, and the heads of the Sister Concern schools. The judges on the occasion were Mr. Vishnuteerth Agnihotri, Vice President, Test Development, Educational Initiatives, Mrs. Deepali Sinha, Educational Advisor, Educational Initiatives and Mr. Prabhakaran, former principal, Kendriya Vidyalaya.

The highlight of the show was the documentary, ‘Pioneer 2009-10’, shot, edited and compiled by our young cinematographers Sharan and Sanjeev of Grade IX. The tuck shops set up within the school premises were an added feast for the visitors as they found an occasion to actually relax on a Sunday. To sum up what the visitors said, “The task of the teachers at Presidency seems to be to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ children to unusual efforts. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary children…and ‘Prayaas’ goes on to prove that Presidency, NLO, is going to make many winners in life”.

MIX Learning

Inventure Academy(Bangalore) organized the 3rd edition of Multiple Intelligences Xplored (M.I.X.) for students on 22 January, 2010 an event based on Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI). Event witnessed participation from 9 schools with more than 300 students.

Multiple Intelligences Xplored (M.I.X.) is an event exclusively designed to distinguish inherent proclivities and talents in children, apart from only mathematical or linguistic intelligences, and bring about a powerful positive impact on the child’s self esteem. It is a unique model that challenges a child’s abilities across eight intelligences.

“After organizing MIX successfully for two consecutive years, we have managed to pull off a hat-trick of victories this year! Our purpose is to make both parents and students realise that every single child is gifted in some unique way.”

She further adds, “In a country like India, where more and more students are facing stress and pressure due to intense competition, it becomes our responsibility to adapt to and promote new methods of learning that suits a child. Education should also be designed to prepare our students in such a way that they don’t get bogged down by competition and parental pressures but realize their own potential and ust that to excel.” - Nooraine Fazal, Co-Founder & CEO of Inventure Academy, Bangalore.

EI working paper series

Educational Initiatives (EI) believes that significantly improved student learning can happen only through systematic research into learning which includes assessment, as well as areas like misconception research. The working paper series shares learnings from various past and present EI projects as well as path-breaking work in these areas elsewhere in the world.

The five working papers published till date are available at http://www.ei-india.com/working-paper-series/.Please write to us at assessment@ei-india.com for questions or comments.

Principals’ Seminar on “Helping Every Child Learn with Understanding”

Educational Initiatives (EI) organised a one-day seminar on “Helping Every Child Learn with Understanding” at Ahmedabad on January 30th, 2010. Thirty (30) principals from leading schools across the country participated in the seminar.

“The seminar was very useful. Changed my perception of EI as a company”.
Mr. Rajiv Sharma, Principal, Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar.

The objective of the seminar was to have a forum of principals from various boards share their views on learning with understanding.

Humourous Bite

Teacher: Your poem is the worst in the class. It’s not only ungrammatical, it’s rude and in bad taste. I’m going to send your father a note about it.
Student: I don’t think that would help, teacher. He wrote it.

To provide students with more learning opportunities, the Educational Initiative tested teachers’ question-making capabilities. Winners of the third Question Making Competition (QMC) were felicitated on Wednesday. Of the 3,700 teachers who participated in the nation-wide competition, 30 were awarded. Educational Initiative focuses on assessment and learningoutcome measurement in school education. The QMC aims to create a platform where teachers’ innovation can be shared and recognized. A workshop on questionmaking skills was held by ASSET; it was attended by teachers and principals of schools in and around Bangalore.“This concept has proved to be quite effective. Framing an intelligent question on the part of teachers becomes important as it alerts children and makes them attentive,” said one of the winners, Gowri Mirlay Achanta of St Joseph’s Boys’ High School. The organizers felt questions should be effective in fostering better learning among children, and not be used only for evaluation. “A good question challenges and stimulates the child to think deeper. If framed correctly, it can help the teacher understand the thought process of a student while solving the problem,” said Sridhar Rajagopalan, managing director, Educational Initiative.

WHO KNOWS THE ANSWER? Teachers participate in a workshop on question-making skills in Bangalore on Wednesday

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KOLKATA: Watching Aamir Khan come up with a simplistic definition of a machine and getting thrown out of class for not following the textbook description in 3 Idiots turned Sridhar Rajgopalan nostalgic. The former IITian could identify with Rancho — the character played by Aamir in the film — when he sought to argue with his teacher that even a trouser zip was a machine and an example like that could help explain things better than tongue-twisting bookish terminology “There is a big lesson that engineering institutions across the country need to learn from the film. Teaching in technical colleges has turned mechanical and students memorize lessons rather than learn them,” said Rajgopalan, who has designed modules for schoolchildren that discourage rote learning. The engineering fraternity in Kolkata accepts that ‘aal izz not well’ with them and that it is time to break the mould.

Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) vice-chancellor Ajoy Ray believes there is a lot of substance in the message that the film seeks to deliver. “We need to change our teaching methodology and evaluation process. Students should enjoy attending classes and learning lessons. They shouldn’t just be driven towards scoring good marks in semester exams,” said Ray.

Thousands of engineering students switch to management or change streams since they don’t have the aptitude to excel in hard-core engineering, say teachers. “This is probably more true for Kolkata than many other cities. Every year, I come across scores of students who would have excelled in basic sciences or in some completely different stream. But they are forced by parental and peer pressure to take up engineering and struggle to complete the course,” added Ray. He cited the example of one of his former students, an IIT graduate, who couldn’t follow his heart and pursue mathematics.

Rote learning is a major reason why colleges are churning out money-spinning professionals rather than innovative thinkers, say teachers. Even the IITs are guilty of driving students towards plum jobs, they admit. “Over the last decade, the focus has shifted from excellence in studies to landing a job with a five-figure salary. The system is geared towards that and this has somewhat undermined the importance of learning. As a result, aptitude has become secondary and everyone has joined the rat race,” said R V Rajakumar, professor, IIT-Kharagpur.

3 Idiots urges students to follow their heart and do what they love doing. “This may sound idealistic but nothing could be more true. An engineering degree might land you a job but won’t ensure success. Only with passion can you inspire students to think like Rancho and design innovative tools like he did for his students in the film. From the teaching point of view, projects and exercises need to be more realistic and interesting to encourage free thinking,” said Rajgopalan.

But nothing could substitute strong infrastructure and a sound teaching system. “You cannot overhaul a system that has been successful. But we need to look beyond the conventional and change with the times,” said Partha Pratim Biswas, professor, Jadavpur University.

Besu has realized the importance of innovative teaching and introduced discussion sessions that review the lessons taught in the course of a week. “We also enact dramas over engineering problems that help to hold students’ interest and teaches them to apply what they have learnt,” said Ray.

Click here to view the original article

Background

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.

Key Findings

1. The level of learning of Bhutanese students is lower than average international levels as represented by reputed international studies.

2. Children are learning certain basic concepts reasonably well, but there clearly are gaps in the learning of intermediate concepts across subjects.

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Paper 2 - STUDENT LEARNING IN THE METROS

Background

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.

Key Findings

1. Students across classes answer rote-based or procedural questions relatively well. The flip side of this, however, is that students seem to rely on memory or learnt procedures to answer almost all questions, rather than trying to think through and solve the unfamiliar ones.
2. Students are learning in ‘compartments’, i.e. they may be aware of two pieces of information, but often don’t know how they are related or how that relation works in a real life situation.
3. Apart from problems with learning strategies, a number of specific and clear ‘common errors’ exist in the different subjects. Since they are widespread, it should not be difficult for textbooks and teachers to specifically address these errors.

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Paper 3 – A personalized adaptive learning system for students

Background

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.
With the constant advancement in Technology, many e-learning solutions have been introduced to achieve quality at scale, but in reality the e-learning solutions tend to be
technology-driven and educationally weak. We present here a solution – Mindspark - we
believe is educationally-rich and technology-supported. It is a computer based, adaptive learning solution designed to allow the child to learn at her own pace and to serve, wherever possible, to supplement, not replace classroom teaching. The system is currently being used for Maths learning and early results have been very encouraging. A language Mindspark system is currently under development and trial.

Mindspark Impact

1. A comparison of the pre- and post-test scores in the Mumbai trials shows a statistically significant positive improvement in student learning – an increase of over 34% on the existing learning base. The improvement in student scores in the Ratlam project was to the tune of 90% on an extremely low learning base.
2. The system’s adaptive logic allows each child to work at her own pace reinforcing the child’s confidence and interest in the subject.

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Paper 4 – Student Progress Tracking System

Background:

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.

Salient features of the SPTS:

Educational Initiatives has developed SPTS both for internal use (tracking performance data of lakhs of students on the ASSET test) as well as for partners (Bhutan’s Royal Education Council). Each system is customised to specific needs and hence the features below refer to a generic system:
• Is either built on, or includes a comprehensive database of students, teacher and schools.
• Multi-language display capabilities to facilitate usage at local levels.
• Schools can update assessment and other progress data regularly if they have access, else send it periodically to centralised office for updating.
• Authority based access to different users –educational planners, teachers, principals (for example, a principal would have full access to the details of his own school but can only view average data for other schools). Schools can choose to keep some data private.
• Provision to record non-academic progress also like sports, arts.
• Ability to automatically handle change of class of student at the end of the year, based on preset date.
• Advanced search capabilities allow searching for data based on complex criteria.
• Ability to add modules to include function like teacher professional development, a statistical module to collate data, etc.
• Each student is tracked uniquely even if he shifts school, state, etc.
• Advanced student learning analysis module which allows provision to view question and question-wise performance if recorded.
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Paper 5 – Interview students to understand their thinking on key concepts

Background:

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.

Study:

Assessment results identify the different wrong answers students provide for a concept, it does not fully explain why students answer in that way. In order to find that out, one approach was simply to ask students this in a ‘student interview’. These interviews are typically conducted in the class itself by trained interviewers. It is common in research studies to conduct individual interviews and use the transcripts – one advantage of the whole-class interaction is that it allows for discussions among students. These interviews are carried out for or in partnership with various partner organisations. They are video recorded and then disseminated to schools where they are used mainly for teacher feedback and training.

Key Findings:

1.In many cases, the same wrong notions and reasons seem to emerge from students across cities and boards. This suggests that the root cause of these wrong notions is similar – possibly observations or experiences or certain common teaching practices.
2.Students are able to talk freely when engaged in a questioning method that is casual. The interviewer has to be very careful this his or her responses do not explicitly or implicitly (through body language, for instance) suggestive that a response is correct or incorrect. If this is ensured, then students freely speak out whatever is on their mind without fear or self-consciousness.
3.Students tend to stick to their notions and do not give up their wrong ideas easily. These wrong notions often do not go away ‘by themselves’ with age either, and even older students tend to give similar reasons as the younger ones when questioned on the same concept.

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Paper 6 – Municipal School Benchmarking Study

Background:

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.

Study:

Students from Local Body schools in 30 urban towns in 5 states - Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Uttaranchal (currently Uttarakhand) were tested in February 2007. Students of classes 2, 4 and 6 were tested in Language and Maths. Environmental Science (EVS) was also included for classes 4 and 6. The tests were developed comparably in 3 languages – Hindi, Gujarati and Telugu.

Key Findings:

1.Students find it difficult to do the most basic and fundamental competencies. e.g., only 26.7% of Class 2 students could give the correct answer to ‘5 - 1=___’ and only 32.8% of Class 4 students could give the answer for ‘20 ÷ 5’
2.Students’ conceptual understanding of whatever they learn is low. e.g., only 6.7% of Class 4 students could answer the question “3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 3 x __ ’, while most gave answers such as 12 and 15 showing that they were not associating the concept of multiplication to be one of repeated addition. Instead they were considering the operator symbol of addition while ignoring the operator for multiplication. This also demonstrated that they may not fully understand the significance of the ‘equal to’ symbol.
3.Students were found to harbour misconceptions in a number of concepts. e.g., students thought that the number with more digits is the bigger number among decimal numbers, that water is living, that moon grew in size to a fuller moon during the course of the night, that clouds are made of smoke and farther away from earth than the Sun or Moon, that heavier objects fall faster, that a housefly has four legs, that all buses have four wheels, that all solids are heavier than liquids, and so on.

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