Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 2

Note: This piece is in continuation of Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 1

What are the challenges?

            One of the biggest challenges I can see is to take all stakeholders on board, help everyone see what the problem is, and how the proposed solution (policy reform) addresses it. For example, looking at the national level enrollment data by gender, policymakers prescribe schools to “engage with their local community and emphasize on education for girls”. What if the state administrators, teachers, parents or community members in a particular social context do not even see lower enrollment of girls as a problem? How do you ensure buy-in from all stakeholders? If the change agents (people at different administrative levels, teachers and school staff) do not believe in what they are asked to do, the policy intervention fails.

            In addition, this one small piece of information (less girls enrolled on average) could be due to a broader social issue of gender equality, school infrastructure, safe commute to school, or even skewed ratio of boys to girls. While the intent of the policymaker could be correct, the proposed solution is too simplistic, vague (terms like engage, local community, emphasize remain undefined), and loaded with assumption of gender bias. Moreover, the causes for fewer enrollments of girls could vary across social contexts. This brings me to the second challenge: generalization of proposed policy intervention. One-size-fits-all way of policy intervention may not work at macro-level. The intervention needs to be sensitive to the local social context.  

            Continuing with the same example, several studies in India have indicated that access to toilets for girls in schools is significantly related to high dropouts in girls. Accordingly, building separate toilets for girls in schools could be more effective than asking teachers to spread awareness about gender-equality for raising enrollments of girls. This point highlights the importance of systematic empirical research across various social contexts prior to policy formulation. Unfortunately, India’s educational sector is highly understudied empirically. There are too few educational research institutes and very little interaction between researchers and the policymakers.

            Fourth challenge deals with highly centralized decision making structure. Because, the proposed policy interventions often lack grass-root level buy-in (due to reasons mentioned above), the state/centre administrators use their position of higher authority to muscle down implementation. Rather than the system supporting the teachers and school staff in serving children, the entire system has to support the administrators to implement their proposed interventions. In the educational administrative hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices from below. The IASs often do the same and cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.

            Finally, the macro-level policy reports talk a lot about all-round development of children, but the focus has been limited to the literacy-rates, enrollment and dropout rates, physical infrastructure of school, and reading and math outcomes (that too very recently). The challenge is to expand this policy focus and to include physical and mental health outcomes of children. Sports, music, performing arts, social cohesion, prevalence of bullying and teasing, relations between teachers and students and among students, psychological support to students, and many vital interventions have remained side-notes in policy drafts and have not found their worthy place in the grass-root level practices. One big reason for their neglect could be that these interventions may not have direct relations with the academic outcomes. However, these interventions are more likely to have positive effects on children’s physical health (e.g., age-level benchmarking of stamina, muscle strength, and flexibility by gender; and medical screening) and/or mental health (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety, and screening for more prevalent disorders). If we can integrate clearly defined health outcomes (physical and mental) as an integral part of national educational policy and develop measures for their systematic evaluation, the field practitioners (administrators at various levels, teachers and school staff) would employ interventions which are important for children’s overall wellbeing and not just for their academics. Perhaps, we may provide our children a more fulfilling school experience.   

            Current government’s emphasis on decentralization of policymaking is encouraging. The fourteenth finance commission gives relatively more economic autonomy to the states than before. However, the states do not have any premier research-driven think tanks to guide their policies. There are SCERTs, but one cannot find any link between production of policy relevant empirical research and policy formulation across states. The central government states that the Niti Aayog will assist states with policy formulation. However, India is too big and complex for any single institution. Also, Niti Aayog, at best, could assist with economic policies, because it does not have any human resource of researchers from the fields of education, psychology, psychometrics, or sociology. Perhaps a more apt approach would be for all states to develop their own multi-disciplinary Niti Aayogs (or make sure SCERTs play that role), and Niti Aayog in Delhi could then coordinate policies across state-level Niti Aayogs. I share some ideas regarding the functioning of these state-level research bodies HERE-Mechanism for Educational Excellence in India: Towards Solution. 

I welcome your comments/questions/rebuttals...

Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 1

This article discusses: 1) a brief overview of national policies in primary education, and 2) the challenges (obstacles) associated with such centralized national policies. For convenience, the article is divided into two blog posts.  

At the time of independence, India’s literacy-rate was close to 18%. Amid great external and internal socio-political conflicts, extremely limited resources and responsibility of a large population, the entire focus of national/provincial policymakers landed on raising literacy-rates. Governments across states built schools and one of the greatest mass-education systems started expanding. However, policymakers soon realized that mere building schools do not necessarily result into increase in enrollment-rates, and it is not easy to retain students into schools. Moreover, malnutrition in children was severe and widely prevalent. To address these multiple challenges, Kamraj’s government in Tamil Nadu implemented a midday meal scheme (1962-63) in which children were served meal at their schools for free. Enrollment rates increased while dropout-rates and malnutrition started decreasing. Gujarat and Kerala followed soon; and by early 90s twelve states had emulated this successful scheme. Later in 1995, Narsimhma Rao’s central government made it India-wide. After 1990, the economic liberalization helped generate more liquidity for school building. Rao’s government also launched District Primary Education Programme (DEPE) which had a prime objective of universalizing primary education. DEPE rolled out in several phases and was implemented in about one third of Indian districts. Later in 2001, Vajpayee’s government launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) which was basically a more comprehensive form of DEPE and was implemented throughout India. Access to within-village school with free meals resulted in increased enrollment from mere 22.3 million students in 1990 (Govinda, & Josephine, 2004) to more than 193 million in 2010-11 (Mehta, 2012). The basic education system, which consisted of around 200,000 schools in 1950, expanded to more than 1.1 million in 2010. As of 2011, India’s literacy rate was around 73% (which was 18% in 1947).

School buildings in neighborhood and free meals were great, but what about learning? Policymakers realized that pupil to teacher ratio (PTR) was skyrocketing (national average of 50.2 in 2000) because teacher recruitment lagged far behind the rapid infrastructural undertaking. Building a school was primarily perceived as onetime expense, and works great politically. Politicians could tell the voters – “we gave you this school!” However, teacher-recruitment was often perceived as a permanent burden on the state budget, and all state (and centre) governments were struggling with high fiscal deficits. To solve this, states started implementing the para-teacher policy (contract-teacher), where teachers are hired on contract bases and on meager salaries. At present, almost all state governments have adopted this policy; and direct teacher-recruitment has been abandoned. There are passionate (and valid) criticisms of this policy especially from educators and teacher unions, but this policy helped bring PTR down (national average of 30.15 in 2010) fairly cheaply.

Now there were school-buildings, teachers, and meals, but policymakers learnt that economic inequality gets translated into educational inequality. Those who can afford, send their kids to private schools. Because the quality of education in public schools is perceived to be of low levels, the percentage of students going to private schools is steadily rising (18.7% in 2006 to 28.3% in 2012 according to ASER Centre, 2012). Low performing government schools are likely to have students from lower socio-economic status and high performing elite schools often have all students from higher socio-economic background. In response, Manmohan Singh’s government introduced Right to Education Act in 2009 that guaranteed free public education to all children between ages 6 to 14 and mandated that even the private schools must have 25% of students from low socio-economic background.   

Moreover, there has been a wide-spread concern about the quality of education in the past couple of decades. Many large-scale studies have indicated poor learning outcomes of students across states. To address this concern, Modi-government recently introduced a sub-scheme of SSA called Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat which is aimed at improving reading and mathematics outcomes. Sample based yearly educational assessment by SCERTs in their respective states and by NCERT on nationally representative sample as prescribed by this scheme seems doable. Standardized academic outcomes should help evaluate existing educational programmes and decide future course of policy-action. This may help compare average learning outcomes across years and across schools/blocks/districts. Scientific identification of top performing schools/blocks/districts could help unpack specific components of best practices which can be emulated in other similar social contexts. This scheme also underscores the role of block and cluster administrators and involves them in monitoring and implementation. However, it goes into micro issues and prescribes specific classroom processes that the teacher and school staff need to follow – that seems over ambitious and difficult to gauge. Nonetheless, it is too early to comment on the effectiveness of this scheme. 

  

Based on the above discussion, we can say:

·         Policymakers need well defined outcomes for evaluation of the existing policies. Measurable clear outcomes also provide future policy directions. As we saw in the discussion above how various policies were basically proposed solutions for prevalent critical problems for respective times.

·         We can also conclude that some of the school-education outcomes that are of interest to the policymakers are: 1) number of schools, 2) enrollment-rates, 3) dropout-rates, 4) malnutrition in children, 5) PTR, and 6) math and reading outcomes. In addition, there are numerous sub-indicators like student enrollment and dropout by their background (various socio-economic categories/ gender/ region/ standard), teachers’ educational level and background characteristics, school infrastructural indicators and so on – which the policymakers often use.

Note: The second part of this post is: Primary Education: Brief History of National Policies- 2

I welcome your comments/questions/rebuttals...

Educational Ecology of Memorization

It was January 2000. I received my class 10 preliminary exam results. Vividly remember getting 71 marks out of 100 in science. My teacher was very disappointed. She said –“Kathan, you don’t cover all points in your responses. Also, you write very slow and don’t finish exam within time-limits. You need a lot of writing practice”.

I learnt an important lesson. Simply understanding the content was not sufficient. If I wanted to score high, I needed to memorize each and every point mentioned in the textbook and reproduce the text in my answer-sheet without spending time on thinking. I practiced just that for the following two month. As a result, I scored 98% in Science in the Board exams.    

In India, when a student is preparing for school/university exam, it is most likely that s/he is

·         preparing model responses for all possible questions across subject content

·         practicing reproduction of available “model” responses through repeatedly reading and/or writing

A lot of policymakers/educators and people who “think they are educationists” label this learning approach as “Rote-Learning” and blame students and teachers. I would like to clarify that memorization is not necessarily rote-learning, but memorization without conceptual understanding is rote-learning. Nonetheless, the blame game is widely prevalent within policy circles and in media and the broader context is ignored. In this piece, I discuss the educational ecology that encourages memorization.

Assessment Practices

With exceptions of some of the elite K-12 schools and premier higher education institutions (e.g., IITs, IIMs), educational assessment in-general is based on the questions listed in the textbooks, previous exam papers (available to students) and/or practice-books at all levels (from primary to university-level). Even the state administered board examinations that are of extremely high stake follow the same trend. (Read: Unscientific assessment practices of Educational Boards) Note that the 12^th standard board exam result serves as a criterion (in most cases, a sole criterion) for the choice of career as well as admission to the higher education institution. These exams focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely see test items that measure higher levels of cognition (i.e., application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. Overall, key to academic success is reproduction of “model” responses (or textbook responses) in timely manner. Now, you see why students practice reproduction of model responses.

Before discussing what teachers do, it is important to understand the context in which they function. For this, let us see the administrative setup.

State-Administrators: Educational policy is mainly a state-level issue. Undisputedly, India’s state administrative setup is highly centralized and extremely hierarchical. On a side note, the Chinese system is much more decentralized. The state administrators decide and allocate resources to all public schools. States micro-manage, for example: hire/fire school staff, develop annual-activity calendars for schools, design curriculum, print textbooks, teaching tools, administer board exams, and conduct professional development programmes. Of course, this is extremely burdensome for the state-level officers, but the system has been like this since Nehru’s time and there has been no public debate on decentralization and capacity building at lower administrative-levels. If you observe the functioning of these state-administrators, you get a feeling that India basically has only one school per state with classes spread across that entire state.  

   

District/Block/Cluster Administrators

Accordingly, the district/block/cluster level administers function as eyes and hands of the state. They have very little autonomy, and are there to execute state-orders and monitor all schools within their purview.

Principal

The principal is basically a teacher with additional administrative duties like: taking responsibility of financial accounts and resource inventories, supervising teachers, keeping up with all state mandated year-round activities and submitting an incredible amount of paper work routinely, attending meetings whenever the higher authorities call on (meetings may be called on the same day and one is expected to be present). But, s/he does not have much say in teacher recruitment, or acquiring funding or resources.

Teachers

Teachers may or may not face problems on personal level, but this profession has been the biggest loser in India’s rapid educational-infrastructural expansion. Some of the big challenges include: Extremely poor pre-service and in-service training, harsh working condition (close to 30-40 hours of lecturing per week with average class-size of 40), little access to teaching aids, and no time allocation for lesson planning, test development, or homework assessment. Average entry-level pay can be 10-15 times lesser for teachers than that for engineers. Note that there is no tenure-track and hardly any pipeline leading to professional growth. Teacher can at the most be a principal if luck favours (but that may not have any monetary benefit). No reward/recognition for good teaching, and pay increases are solely based on seniority.   

            In this educational hierarchy, teachers are at the very bottom. Bossism is very explicit and people at higher level of administration display their power unapologetically. I have seen principals sit on the floor while the state administrators sit at a dais and get an emperor like treatment. It’s difficult to imagine a government school teacher arguing on a policy issue with the state-administrators. The entire social context is set up to make teachers feel they are subservient to all higher-level administers. Accordingly, instead of catering to the students, teachers’ cater to the principal and the administrators at the level above. In fact, the entire machinery caters to people at the level above and exercises power to shut down voices coming from below. The IASs often do the same. They cater to their political masters and shut off any complaints coming from levels below.   

            In this tradition of catering to the bosses amid demoralizing social context, teachers do what it takes to keep things going. The dutiful ones cover their syllabus. It should be noted that the Indian curricula across various educational boards cover incredible breadth of subject content. To give an illustration, things that I studied in 8^th grade physics (e.g., Newtonian Mechanics) are taught at the undergraduate-level in the US. The only way this great breadth of curriculum can be covered is through the use of lecture method. Ideally, a teacher would be able to spend some time introducing a concept and then demonstrate solutions for some textbook questions before moving on to new content. There is little time for experimentation or critical classroom discussions and to go in-depth of the subject. And let’s not forget, the exams do not care for depth. It is very common for teachers to ask students to write responses for the textbook questions more than once for homework.

Parents

Parents in-general are concerned about the results and not the process. Unfortunately, the social context is set up where memorization is considered as a sign of being genius. I have an untested hypothesis that children whose parents are more involved with their studies memorize more content.  

Private Tutoring

The prime purpose of private tutoring is to get access to model responses and to drill and practice more memorization. It is very common for the tutors to share their own version of “model” responses with their students.

            Today as I look back to my 10^th standard board exam preparation, I wonder what if the exams had significant amount of test items at application level. I spent more than two months almost memorizing the entire textbook. What if I had spent that time designing some experiments, visiting museums, reading popular science magazines or watching sci-fi movies? I had this sort of question on my board exam:

What is Environmental Degradation? Mention the measures to control Environmental Degradation. (5 marks)

One definition and all eight points on ‘Measures to control Environmental Degradation’ mentioned in the textbook. Of course, I nailed it. But, what if I was asked the following question (which had no readily available model response):

Based on your knowledge of the science textbook, prepare a detailed plan of action to cope up with the Environmental Degradation in your home town/village/city. (5 marks)

What if we prepare a social context where students need to tap into their deeper levels of learning? This cannot happen overnight. It is a gradual process: increasing weightage of application level questions on exams, high quality teachers who are as professionally competent and as well-paid as any engineer, doctor, or scientist on average, more experimentation and higher order discussions in classrooms, entire administrative structure which caters to the students and not the bosses, and….

[Note: This piece sheds light on common patterns. There are always exceptions. A lot of administrators, principals, teachers and parents are putting incredible amount of efforts keeping the students at the centre; and there’s always a Rancho in every classroom.] 

I welcome your comments.

How Politicians can Improve Educational Outcomes?

Given that education is closely related to human development at individual as well as societal level, the politicians are always under-pressure to perform in this sector. They need to be seen as doing something – preferably something revolutionary – with a great reformist agenda.  Something that is very concrete and they can throw back at their opponents, media or civil-society or whosoever asks them questions about. Something that the voters may easily digest and vote them back to power. Importantly, they need to do this “something” within a span of a couple of years so people can see results before the next election. So what do they end up doing?

1)    Create a law or introduce a new policy: This is something that politically makes sense the most. Out of all other options, this is often the easiest thing to do given that the governments have majority in the parliament (or state assembly). It does not take more than a few months to draft a law/policy; and once the bill is passed, the political party can trumpet the passing of law as an historical achievement for all subsequent elections.

2)    Create new institutions: The second best politically lucrative option is expanding educational infrastructure. Though this strategy may take a few years of time, the masses see actual concrete-structures. Increasing number of schools/colleges definitely boosts a government’s report-card. In addition, this creates more jobs, increases enrolment-rates, and in-turn expands skilled workforce, which may fuel economic growth.

So far, Indian politicians have primarily relied on the above two strategies. Unfortunately, this could be necessary, but it is certainly not a sufficient condition for improving the quality of education. Then the big question is –

·        Is improvement of education quality not a politically sound strategy?

If the answer is no, then we should probably accept that the quality of mass education will never improve given its politically adverse consequences. The politicians are certainly smart (some may say ‘selfish’) enough not to ruin their personal interest. I have heard cynical arguments saying that the last thing politicians want is citizens with education and independent minds, because they will be difficult to manipulate. The voting pattern will be then based on government’s performance and not on caste/religion-lines. I find it difficult to buy this argument, given that India is already showing a voting-pattern where the government perceived to be not performing is voted out (e.g., Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu etc.). In order to retain power, the governments have to perform as evident in most elections in the past decade (e.g., BJP in Gujarat, Congress in Delhi, JDU in Bihar, BJD in Odisha, CPIM in Tripura, BJP in Chhattisgarh etc.). Therefore, governments not just need to be functional but need to be efficiently governing in today’s India in order to remain in power.   

This raises a second question -

·        If it is a good strategy to improve educational outcomes, then why has there not been any serious political discourse on it?

The primary reason is that India does not have standardized state administered testing. Therefore, the quality of education is never clearly defined. After all, what is quality education? Is the passing-rate of 80% in the tenth grade state board exam a high quality? The answer is – we do not know. Lack of standardized testing has kept all educators, policy makers and politicians clueless. Also, there is no way one can compare students of various states on their educational outcomes as their educational boards conduct independently developed unscaled tests. Therefore, when a new policy is introduced or a new institution is built, we do not know if that is improving the educational outcomes. It is not possible to compare same cohort of students across grades or different cohorts of students across years. Though in recent years Pratham (an NGO) administers ASER surveys (testing for word and number recognition, and basic addition/subtraction) on nationally representative sample, it unlikely to drive any direct effect on states’ policies or educational practices given its non-governmental nature. In other words, the states may not target those outcomes for driving policy change.

Note that, I do not advocate a system analogous to America’s No Child Left Behind Act, where all students take tests at various stages of their schooling and high-stakes decisions related to funding and staffing are based on the student scores. I firmly believe student achievement can be one of the many criteria for teacher/school assessment, but it can never be the only criterion. However, we certainly need standardized scaled testing (at least in math, languages, and science) at lower primary, upper primary and high school level on scientifically sampled students. The primary purpose of such testing can be as follows:

·        Develop various educational interventions for improved practices

·        Test effectiveness of interventions

·        Scale up the interventions and evaluate effects

·        Design policy and Evaluate its effects over years (standardized test may help compare students of different cohort across years)

·        Gradually, move on to maintaining database on educational progress of all students (with vertically scaled tests we should be able to compare students’ progress across grades)

Given that educational policies are primarily formed at state-level, each state needs to take this testing responsibility. As and when required, the centre government can fund research studies to assess educational outcomes of nationally representative sample of students. The centre may also facilitate the development of a scaling system to compare scores of different educational boards.

One very important suggestion – keep all raw data-files publicly available on website with concealed personal identities. If states only publish results, that is not sufficient. Data sharing in a transparent manner will not only help establish credibility, but will facilitate educational researchers across the world greatly. More research will then inform policy and the cycle of knowledge production will eventually perturb the quality improvement, which is perceived to be in a hibernate state.     

          Such a system will bring everyone out of the rhetoric of educational quality improvement. The politicians, all educational stake-holders, the media and civil society – all will have something concrete to talk about and the serious political discourse on educational outcomes will find its way. As today various governments project their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth-rates, someday they will be able to highlight improvements in the educational outcomes.

But, how will politicians ensure improvements in educational outcomes?

Answer is simple:

·        Ask researchers what interventions may produce positive educational outcomes.

·        Ask them to implement those interventions on a few randomly selected schools. Let them come up with findings.

·        If findings are positive, scale up the project. Implement in several villages/districts. Start talking about the results in your speeches.

·        If findings are still positive, talk about findings in the media. Use your political persuasion to convince all districts (it is very important for the people to buy-in intervention because they are the one who will implement it. If they do out of your fear/ negative consequence attached, things may fall apart soon.)

·        Ask bureaucrats to set up time-line for state-wide expansion of project. It may take 2-3 years, but if people know the process is on, they will appreciate you. Avoid over-night implementations; as system may not digest interventions completely. Halfhearted educational interventions are extremely prone to failure. If at any stage an intervention shows negative results, ask the researchers to fix it and withheld the expansion plan.

·        Bonus tips: Communication with people is the key. If you start talking the language of educational outcomes, the media will soon follow and so will your political opponents (else they will be washed out).  

India needs the best of its politicians. It is like swimming against the tide and I could totally be naïve, but am still a believer. 

I welcome your comments...

What is stopping India from Quality Mass Education?

            Given that India is so vast and diverse, it is just not possible for any individual to summaries its highly complex problems. Nonetheless, I shall attempt to touch upon some of the overall factors that hinder improvement in quality of mass-education.

·         Lack of clarity of measurable objectives of education at all administrative levels (from central government to individual classrooms): At any level of administration, there is no consensus on what kind of future citizens do we want. I understand some objectives may differ depending on the social context. However, objectives in India differ depending on who is responding to the question even at school-level. Therefore, educators and administrators often do not see any unified purpose of their actions. In addition, the idealistic goals that various governments declare often find little policy support and are hardly ever systematically evaluated.

·         Cycle of Deteriorating Teacher Quality as explained in figure below:

Note: There can always be exceptions. Teacher in elite-private schools are much better off.

·         Highly Hierarchical Centralized Structure: Curriculum, school calendar, text books, school fees, all physical resources are usually decided by state governments. System is based on lack of trust and assumption seems to be that people will abuse their power if granted to them. Furthermore, the hierarchy descends in order of Ministers → State administrators → district administrators → cluster coordinators → principals → teachers (full time senior, junior, contract teachers). Generally, person at lower-level is “supposed” to be an obedient servant of the higher authority. It is highly unlikely that a teacher expresses displeasure regarding policy decision to a district or state administrator face to face in Indian system.

·         Low accountability of teachers, principals, educational administrators at all levels in public education: Government jobs in India are often considered as the most secured jobs. Educational administrators at any level and teachers/ principals in government schools may get fired only in rarest of the rare cases. In their study Kremer and colleagues found that during unannounced visits 25% of teachers were absent from school, and only about half were involved in teaching activity (Kremer, Muralidharan, Chaudhury, Rogers, & Hammer, 2005). This study surveyed nationally representative sample of more than 3700 schools during three unannounced visits. Results suggested that a 10% increase in teacher absence was associated with 1.8% lower student attendance, as well as with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores of 4th-grade children. One good thing is that inefficiency of teachers is at least being studied systematically. There is no research done to examine how efficient the principals or educational administrators at district or state-level are. Nonetheless, India does not have any effective mechanism to tackle irresponsible behaviour of her public servants.  

·         Memory-based assessment: Research shows that the teaching methodology of teachers and the learning methods of students greatly depend on the type and quality of questions asked in educational assessments. Thus, if the majority of Indian students are choosing rote memorization and superficial learning strategies to crack the scholastic examinations, something must be wrong with the assessment system. Most educational assessments focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely get opportunity to exhibit their in-depth learning. In addition, replication of the text of the textbooks is often considered as an “ideal” answer and is well rewarded by the examiners. Thus, persistence of this trend and high proportion of knowledge-level questions have basically converted educational assessment into memory-tests.

·         Poor understanding of Educational Science: Education as a field of study is often narrowly understood as “teacher training”. India has not developed educational infrastructure for producing curriculum designers, educational administrators and school leaders, school psychologists, educational policymakers, psychometricians and so on. In addition, educational researchers have hardly ever found significant voice in national or state-level policy making. Also, educational researchers have shied away from both electronic and print media and there has not been informed public debate on various educational issues. I would be surprised if any Indian, except an educational researcher him/herself, would be able to name even three Indian educationists.

I hope this article helps address the last point at the very least.

“Unscientific” practices of Educational Boards: why tolerate?

Image Courtesy: Vishal Bhatt: www.facebook.com/wizard.vishal

Most of the educational boards in India conduct examinations at the end of 10^th and 12^th grades. The 10^th grade result plays a big role in narrowing down student’s choice of academic discipline for further studies (e.g., liberal-arts, commerce, or science-stream); whereas the 12^th grade result serves as a criterion (at times, a sole criterion) for the choice of career as well as admission to the higher education institution. Over the years, the board examination system has changed at administrative level with things happening in a more efficient way. However, things were poor, are poor, and are on a path towards poorness when it comes to scientific assessment. Here’s why:

The state boards have never published any of the psychometric properties (e.g., reliability, validity, item discrimination, & difficulty value) of their tests. Perhaps nobody has ever cared for asking for it. Today, through this article, I would like to raise this vital issue and draw your attention to a mass-deception exercise in the form of the “Board Exams” that decides careers of our youth.  

Ten big points for improving the Board Examination:

1.                  Improving Reliability and Validity of Test Items

All tests have these two basic characteristics:

·         Validity: Measure the concepts that we want to measure (i.e., A weighting-machine should measure weight, not any other property).  

·         Reliability: Scores should be consistent for the same competency level of student (i.e., A weighting-machine should show same weight every time we step on it, as long as our weight is constant).

The State Board Examination papers often have test items that are likely to have significantly poor reliability and validity. Moreover, some test items simply measure the memorization of the opinion (and not scientific facts) of text-book authors that has nothing to do with the subject content. Let’s have a look at the following test items, which are taken from Question Bank-2008 of Gujarat Secondary Education Board (Source- http://203.77.200.35/gseb/question-paper.htm).

Towards what Indians have developed the feeling of equality? (Std. 10- Social Science)

   A)     Huge living beings

   B)     Nature

   C)    All living beings

   D)    Animals

Which one is the most valuable asset to human being? (Std. 12- Psychology)

   A)     Money

   B)     Strength

   C)    Mind

   D)    Language

What could be the rationale for above test items? Perhaps, “how well do you remember personal (unscientific) opinions of our authors?” The test maker should check validity and reliability for tests and provide rationale for each test item.

2.      Diminishing Excessive Focus on Lower Cognitive Level

In this era of globalization, where our youth will compete with the best of the world, we got to encourage critical and creative thinking and problem solving skills. Research shows that the teaching methodology of teachers and the learning methods of students greatly depend on the type of final examination (type and quality of questions). Thus, if the majority of our students are choosing rote memorization and superficial learning strategies to crack the State Board examination, something must be wrong with the type of questions being asked. The board exams focus excessively on knowledge and understanding levels of cognition (as per Bloom’s Taxonomy). The students rarely get opportunities to exhibit their in-depth learning driven by mastery oriented goals. Our test items should measure higher levels of cognition as well (i.e., application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation).

Let’s look at the following question taken from March-2010 10^th grade social science test-item.

What is Environmental Degradation? Mention the measures to control Environmental Degradation. (5 marks)

This question is at knowledge-level and requires only good memorization skills to get a full score. How about questioning in the following manner-

Based on your knowledge of social science text book, prepare a detailed plan of action to cope up with the Environmental Degradation in your home town/village/city. (5 marks) 

The above question will demand insightful learning of environmental degradation; and will measure higher levels of cognition. Of course, this will also demand better teaching from teachers. Such test items have potential to break the cycle of poor teaching→ poor learning → poor testing; and encourage students to study for mastering the subject, rather than remembering the content. They will also encourage teachers to facilitate learning, and to critically analyze, evaluate, and discuss issues in the classroom. 

3.      Preparing Tests that Distinguish Students

In the present scenario, the test items are not designed so that they distinguish between a mediocre student, a poor student, and a brilliant student (i.e., discrimination parameter in technical terms). This requires creation of large item pool and thorough item analyses of each item.

4.      Making Difficulty Level Uniform

Many times test paper of one subject is more difficult than that of other subjects. It is a mystery if the difficulty level of a test is analyzed by the test-developers. If the difficulty level of tests of optional subjects is different, it will be unscientific to compare the total scores across exams of these subjects. For example- student “A” has scored 80 in Sanskrit-test, which has lower difficulty level, whereas student “B” has scored 80 in Hindi-test, which has high difficulty level. In such case, the score of 80 in Hindi has higher value than that of in Sanskrit. In current practice, these technicalities are completely ignored.

5.      Rationalizing Time Limits

Many times, some exam-papers are lengthy and some are not. And at times, for two students of same competency level, the difference in their result is determined by their writing speed. Now, should the measurement of writing speed be an objective of the state board examination? We ought to devise the length of exam rationally and uniformly. Do we want to give our students time to critically think, to evaluate, to judge, to analyze, and to apply their knowledge? Or we simply want them to vomit out all rote-learning of the previous night? Have the test developers considered the speeededness factor in analyses?

6.      Establishing Uniform Test Administration

Though tests are administered simultaneously in the entire state, the testing conditions are not uniform. The supervisors are not trained and do not have standardized code of conduct. Thus, it is likely that the students in different exam-halls interact differently with the supervisor. Some supervisor may be proactive and helpful, while others may be sluggish and arrogant. This can severely affect the morale of the test taker. The conditions in which students take examination ought to be standardized. Also, environmental factors (like- temperature, wind/rain), physical distance between students, quality of writing desks, noise level, and supervisor behavior should be controlled uniformly across the state. Thus, someone who takes exam in a private school in Ahmedabad has the same exam-experience as someone writing exam in a remote village of Dang.  In addition, we need to control systematic cheating that takes place in many exam-centers. No student should get “center-advantage” or “center-disadvantage”.

7.      Eliminating Subjective Evaluation and Improving Transparency

Many teachers/ parents/ students/ educationalists keep questioning the credibility of the board examination. Subjective evaluation is one of the major factors hurting the credibility of the test. This is related with the inter-rater reliability of test. The test score should be consistent even if different examiner evaluates the test. We got to study the inter rater reliability of these exams. At the very least, inter-rater reliability coefficient has to be greater than 0.7, given that the stakes are high for students.  We cannot allow mood/ personality/or personal views of examiners to determine the careers of our future citizens.

In addition, the examination system has to be more transparent. The students should have an opportunity to know why their score is cut, and what information is missing. They should also get an opportunity to see the answer-key. Of course, there may not be one right response for an essay type question but a model response should be shared with the students so that they can work on their deficiencies. This will also help teachers to have deeper understanding of what objectives they should consider while teaching.

8.      Accommodating Students with Special needs

Most of the educational boards do not provide information on how they accommodate children with special needs except for blind, or speech/hearing impaired. There is a wide range of children that require support. For example- learning-disabled, emotionally disturbed, autistic, schizophrenic, & intellectually challenged etc. When will we acknowledge that formally in educational system?

9.      Improving Predictive Value

If the result of an examination is to be considered for admission or employment purpose, then such examination should have proven predictive value. Though its results are used for admissions and employment, the board exam is aimed only to measure the present competency of student. It does not predict the future success of student in respective subjects. In simple terms, score of 100 in Physics does not predict that the student will succeed in Physics courses at the University level. Now, if we want the result of this examination to be considered for university admissions/ employment, we may include subject-wise aptitude test like SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) in the US. With help of experts, the board can generate tests of high predictive value. The result of such tests may provide important additional information to the universities/colleges/employers about the natural proclivity of the student towards the subject.

10.  Gradually move on to Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT)

In this era of IT revolution (something that India is proud of), we can no longer carry on laborious  expensive and exhaustive ways of large scale assessment. The boards should devise concrete action plans to move on to CAT. Of course, this will take time (to self-educate, to educate educational administrators/teachers/students/parents and masses and to generate resources). But, there are great advantages of CAT as mentioned below:

·         Facilitating convenience of Students/ Parents

·         Standardize test-administration, higher credibility and scientific testing

·         Better control on systematic cheating

·         Greatly encourage computer literacy into masses

·         Development of testing industry in India

In technical terms, the present practices represent a crude and a bit distorted version of classical testing theory. Research in the field of educational measurement suggests that item response theory (IRT) is superior indeed. Many developed nations have moved on to more scientifically rigorous ways of assessing educational outcomes through IRT. It is a high time for Indian states to begin reforms in this direction as well; else they will be out-educated by developed nations with a great margin. There are endless reasons why India has continued these practices. I am simply not going to dig that up as that will be nothing more than a blame game. But, it is clear; I cannot tolerate the current status quo on this front, can you?