Odisha's Department of School Education and Literacy has planned a common assessment platform through which school students across all state education boards will be evaluated on their learning outcomes. Sanjay Kumar, Secretary of the Department gave out this information on the concluding day of the G20 Education Working Group meeting on April 28 in Bhubaneswar.
The department has decided to bring all the education boards under one platform and provide them hand-holding support to conduct state-specific assessment surveys, he said. India has two primary education boards, CBSE and ICSE, besides 60 more, a majority of which are controlled by states, as per a report by The New Indian Express.
Since 2017, the Ministry of Education has been doing a National Achievement Survey (NAS), a school-based assessment, every three years to assess progress and learning competencies as an indicator of the health of the education system. Students of Classes III, V, VIII and X are evaluated under it in key curricular areas of Language, Mathematics, EVS/Science and Social Sciences. The last NAS survey was conducted in 2021 when the ministry reached out to nearly three million children across all states and union territories.
“We are all aware that India has 62 education boards. What and how a student learns to a very large extent is dependent on the kind of assessment system states education boards have,” Kumar said. After NEP-2020 was framed, an institution called PARAKH was set up in the NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) whose basic aim is to conduct NAS every three years and also, handhold the states to do a state-specific achievement survey for their understanding of the local learning outcomes.
Through PARAKH, the department will interact with states on a regular basis to evolve standards for a common assessment system across the country in the next three years. “You would agree that today there is a greater transportability of students. Someone who is studying in Class VI in one state may study Class VII in another state. So, it is extremely imperative that we have a commonality in the assessments of all states,” the Secretary said.
However, many states including Odisha do not have a system in place to assess the learning outcomes of their students. NAS 2021 in Odisha had covered only 1,270 schools, 3,442 teachers and 22,427 students. The only survey that Odisha School Education Programme Authority (OSEPA) had carried out was a baseline assessment study last year for students from Class VI to VIII.
Skilling is also important
Education officials and stakeholders from India and other G20 countries also acknowledged the need to skill, upskill and re-skill youth to keep up with the evolving world in the G20 meeting. Kumar said that based on the various outcomes of the meeting, the focus would also be on improving foundational literacy and numeracy among Indian students, as per TNIE.
The meeting focused on three themes — building an agile response to the needs of labour markets and institutional capacity building in the context future of work, enabling high-quality technical and vocational education, creating pathways between higher and vocational education and equipping children with a range of future skills to set them on the course of lifelong learning. More than 60 delegates from 27 countries including G20 members, UNICEF, UNESCO and Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) attended the meeting.
