Bhamy V Shenoy
Mysuru: Pratham has been publishing Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) for rural India since 2005 with a break in 2014.
ASER makes an assessment of the learning levels of rural students – both in government and private schools. Successive reports should have shocked the nation since they have consistently showed that our children are not performing at the level they should.
5-year-olds are exposed to a very wide variety of environments and inputs, depending on where they are enrolled: 26.3% children are in anganwadis, 40.6% children are in private LKG or UKG classes, and 23.9% are in government or private schools attending standard I or above.
Children were administered five cognitive tasks – sorting, spatial awareness, seriation, pattern recognition and puzzle. As expected ability to perform tasks improves with age from 4 to 5 irrespective of schooling status. It came as a surprise that most students were not able to perform these simple tasks even at age 5. For example for age 5 children, only 44% in anganwadi, 50% in private preschools and 30% who were not enrolled could do simple pattern recognition.
One more example. Of all 4-year-olds enrolled in anganwadis, 63.8% can do a sorting task, 51.7% can do a spatial awareness task, 39.4% can do a seriation task, 38.8% can do pattern recognition and 31% can do puzzle. Worse has yet to come.
The ability to identify emotions is an important part of social and emotional development. The child is shown four face cards depicting sadness, happiness, anger and fear. At age 4, only 24% could identify all four emotions and it was slightly better for age 5 at the level of 33.6%. Top score was for happiness emotion of 62% for age 4 and 72% for age 5.
Lack of preparedness at pre schooling becomes evident while looking at reading and numeracy skills of children at grade I. Only 16 % of children in standard I can read at grade I level, while 39% cannot even read a letter, 29% can identify letters, 15% can read a word.
25% in Standard I could not recognize a number while 51% could do one digit addition and 39% could do one digit subtraction. Only 40% could do oral word problem addition.
ASER analysis has showed that early language and numeracy skills improve if a child is able to perform cognitive tasks better. This suggests that focussing on play-based activities that build memory, reasoning and problem-solving abilities is far more productive than an early focus on content knowledge.
Unfortunately today even at pre schooling level, reciting nursery rhymes or rote learning to demonstrate one’s knowledge of facts is more stressed than encouraging children to indulge in things where they want to discover new things out of inherent curiosity on their own, a methodology stressed in Montessori school.
ASER tried to correlate mother’s education level to the performance of their children in terms of performing three cognitive tasks and reading and numeracy skills. In all categories there was positive correlation which should not come as a surprise. Higher the education level of the mother, children performed better.
However this does not justify teachers blaming parents for the poor performance of their students. While it is certainly advantageous to have educated parents, children can still overcome the handicap if they have dedicated and competent teachers.
Pratham has done a great contribution by highlighting the problem of dysfunctional early childhood education. It is not rocket science to improve ECE as has been clearly discussed in DNEP. And it cannot be done through baby steps. We need transformative reforms. Let us hope that our country will implement DNEP on a war footing.
– Team Mysoorunews
