Learning Loss measurement to being pan-India

How are school children doing in India, after more than 500 days of sustained closure? An assessment is arriving.

 Learning Loss measurement to being pan-India

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• The story: The pandemic led to a more than 500 days schools closure in India! That is a humongous loss of learning by any standards. Now, the government is planning a survey to find the learning loss from it. Then the solutions will be planned.
• NAS: The so-called National Achievement Survey (NAS) will be India’s largest official school education assessment exercises, and will include both state-run and private schools for the first time. The survey report will have separate data for national and district levels, giving a clear view on accumulation of unlearning, damage done and expected time for recovery.
• What NAS will do: Education Ministry officials say it will give a concrete picture about the learning loss during covid and help us in framing the way forward better. Few surveys by private entities have claimed a learning loss of around 60%, but what is needed is a fair idea via government's own survey. The govt. exercise will be massive, comprising around 4 million students and have samples from every single district of the country. Students in Classes III, V, VIII and X will be surveyed simultaneously.
• Modus operandi: The exercise will be conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The assessment will be in the second week of November, and outcome in four to six months. Once the outcomes are ready, it will help in national, state and district-specific policy formulation to correct it.

1. The instrument development, testing, finalization of the test items, sampling of the schools, etc., will be done by NCERT.
2. The actual administration of the test in the sampled schools will be done by CBSE. NAS 2021 will cover the entire spectrum of schools, i.e. government schools (central and state government), government-aided schools and private schools across the country.
3. It is expected that nearly 123,000 schools and 38 lakh students in 733 districts across 36 states and Union territories will be covered in the NAS 2021 test.
4. Language, mathematics and environmental studies will be surveyed for Classes III and V. Students of Class VIII will be assessed in language, mathematics, science and social science and Class X students will be assessed in language, mathematics, science, social science and English.
5. The NAS exercise would be conducted in 22 languages, including Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and Nepali. The exercise was last held as a competence-based test in 2017.

• Closure: Schools were closed in mid-March 2020 just ahead of the nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Though schools went online soon, lack of access to electronic gadgets and good internet connectivity impacted the quality of education, especially in rural India.
• EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) What are the three ways the immense learning loss incurred by crores of Indian school students be reversed? List and explain. (2) What are the reasons the govt. dithered in opening schools, while other economic avenues were opened up earlier? Explain. (3) Evaluate the impact of the long school closures on the potential demographic dividend of India.

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