Class III hope in poor progress report

-The Telegraph

New Delhi: A survey of children’s learning levels has found that Class V and Class VIII students performed as poorly in arithmetic in 2016 as they did in 2014 but Class III kids did marginally better.

 

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released today also found little change in the enrolment figures in private schools. About 30.5 per cent children of the 6-14 age group were enrolled in private schools in 2016 against 30.8 per cent in 2014.

 

Facilitated by NGO Pratham, the ASER, a survey in rural India focusing on the status of children’s learning, was carried out in 17,473 villages, covering 350,232 households and 562,305 children from 589 rural districts.

In 2014, about 25.4 per cent Class III children in the country could do a two-digit subtraction. This has risen to 27.7 per cent in 2016.

The improvement has come mainly from government schools where the percentage of Class III children who could do a two-digit subtraction rose from 17.2 per cent to 20.2 per cent during this period.

The states from where Class III students showed a five-percentage point improvement since 2014 include Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and Chhattisgarh.

The arithmetic skills of Class V children, measured by making them work out simple division problems, remained almost the same at 26 per cent as in 2014.

However, the performance of Class VIII students in tackling three-digit by one-digit division problems has dipped from 2014.

The proportion of such students was 44.2 per cent in 2014. It has fallen to 43.3 per cent in 2016.

Nationally, the proportion of Class III children able to read at least Class I level text has gone up slightly – from 40.2 per cent in 2014 to 42.5 per cent in 2016. But the ability to read English is unchanged for lower primary grades.

Again, the reading levels of Class VIII children nationally show a slight decline from 74.7 per cent in 2014 to 73.1 per cent in 2016.

The enrolment in elementary schools for the age group 6-14 has been around 96 per cent since 2009. Kerala and Gujarat have shown an increase in government school enrolment compared to 2014.

ASER Centre director Rukmini Banerji said improvement in arithmetic ability of Class III children in government schools proves that the schools are capable of improving their standards.

"What is required now is to sustain and push the improvement at all levels," Banerji said.

She could not cite any specific reason for the improvement but said states had become more aware about the poor learning levels in recent years.

At the launch of a web portal on school education, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar stressed on improvement of quality of education in schools. He said the NCERT had come up with the expected class-wise learning outcome levels, which would be made part of the rules under the Right To Education Act.

But Madhav Chavan, the CEO of Pratham, said the expected learning outcome levels should not be linked tospecific classes but to stages like primary and upper primary.