Working Paper Series
Paper 1 - ANNUAL STATUS OF STUDENT LEARNING
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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