Maharashtra teacher questions education report data, methodology
Ahead
of the nation-wide release of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER),
2016, a teacher from Solapur has questioned the methods employed to conduct the
survey, which is considered to be one of the most telling reports on the
quality of education in the country.
While
ASER is back after a gap of one year and will be released on Wednesday,
Ranjitsinh Disale, a teacher from a Zilla Parishad school, has come out with a
55-page review of the national survey alleging flaws in its methodology and
raising questions on its findings.
Disale
said the survey uses tools designed according to the ‘early grade reading
assessment (EGRA)’ but it bears only a little relevance to the course content
taught in schools. According to the comparisons drawn up in the review, Class 1
assessment had only 24.82% relevance to the syllabus and Class 2 was
55.71%.
Another
inconsistency mentioned in the report is that a minimum of 500 schools must be
part of the sample from each division of Maharashtra while conducting a
comparative survey based on the EGRA parameters, states the review. According
to this, a total of 4, 500 schools from nine divisions of Maharashtra must be
surveyed. But the ASER 2014 data was based on 33 government schools and 33
households out of 33 districts.
The
teacher’s other allegations include that the survey is conducted by unknown
people so children are not comfortable or relaxed during the assessment and in
identifying numbers, the review claims that the number three, for instance, is
written in Devnagri script even though textbooks write it as ‘3’, and this
confuses students.
When
contacted, Madhav Chavan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Pratham,
the NGO that conducts the survey, said he knew about the review but didn’t want
to comment on it.
Meanwhile,
Pratham officials said Disale has been approaching them with this review for
the last five years. “We have looked at the report and we are in talks with
him,” said an official.
The
ASER report had previously drawn flak from the education department. After the
2014 report, the organisation didn’t release a national report in 2015. Only
Maharashtra and Punjab reports were published.
Source
| Hindustan Times | 17 January 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
No comments:
Post a Comment