Elementary Education in India: Its present status and problems:

Annual Status of Education Report (ASER):
•Beginning in 1996, the non government organization Pratham has worked with children in thousands of villages and urban slums across India. For much of this period, the focus of this  work has been on helping children master basic skills in reading and arithmetic.
•Every year, it brings out its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since 2005, on the basis of extensive household surveys conducted to assess children’s schooling status and basic learning levels in reading and arithmetic.

Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)

• ASER surveys use Census 2011 as the sampling frame.
• ASER continues to be an important national source of information about children’s foundational skills across the country.
• In 2016, ASER switched to an alternate-year cycle where this ‘basic’ ASER is conducted every other year (2016, 2018, and next in 2020); and in alternate years ASER focuses on a different aspect of children’s schooling and learning.
• In 2017, ASER 'Beyond Basics' focused on the abilities, experiences, and aspirations of youth in the 14-18 age group.
• In 2018 ASER had data on enrollment patterns in age group 4 to 8.

Why in News
The Non-governmental organization (NGO) Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report 2019 has flagged poor learning outcomes in schools.

• ASER 2019 reported on the pre-schooling or schooling status of children in the age group 4 to 8 years in 26 rural districts (districts with rural population >70%) across 24 States.
• The report focuses on the “early years” and lays emphasis on “developing problem-solving faculties and building memory of children, and not content knowledge”.

Early years

• It is defined globally as age 0-8, is known to be the most important stage of cognitive, motor, social and emotional development in the human life cycle.
• It explores children’s performance on 4 competencies that are identified as important predictors of future success, viz.
• Cognitive Development,
•  Early Language,
•  Early Numeracy, and
•  Social and Emotional Development.

Key FIndings

• ASER Report 2019 argues that a focus on cognitive skills rather than subject learning in the early years can make a big difference to basic literacy and numeracy abilities.
•  It tested cognitive skills of children.
• Tests included sorting images by colour and size, recognising patterns, fitting together a four-piece animal puzzle — as well as simple literacy and numeracy tests.
• However, of those children who could correctly do all three cognitive tasks, 52% could read words, and 63% could solve the addition problem.
• ASER data shows that children’s performance on tasks requiring cognitive skills is strongly related to their ability to do early language and numeracy tasks.
• This suggests that focussing on play-based activities that build memory, reasoning and problem-solving abilities is more productive than an early focus on content knowledge.
•  Reading and early childhood education
• Only 16% of children in Class 1 can read the text at the prescribed level, while almost 40% cannot even recognise letters.
• Early childhood education has the potential to be the “greatest and most powerful equaliser”.
• Global research shows that 90% of brain growth occurs by age 5, meaning that the quality of early childhood education has a crucial impact on the development and long-term schooling of a child.
• Private schools ahead : Of 6 year olds in Class 1, nearly 42% of those in private schools could read words in comparison to only 19% from government schools.
• This gap is further exacerbated by a gender divide.
• More than a quarter of Class 1 students in government schools are only 4 or 5 years old, younger than the recommended age. These younger children struggle more than others in all skills.
• At the same time, 36% in Class 1 are older than the Right To Education (RTE) Act (2009) -mandated age of 6.
• It can be noted that the draft New Education Policy (NEP), 2019 also links the “severe learning crisis” to what goes on with young children in India.

National Achievement Survey:
•At the disaggregated level, The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has conducted National Achievement Surveys (NAS) periodically since 2001 for Classes 3, 5 and 8.
•The NAS is a school-based national survey covering all States and Union Territories and focusing on specific classes in particular years.
•It is carried out by NCERT under the mandate of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme to “monitor improvement in children’s learning levels and to periodically assess the health of the government education system as a whole.
•NAS reveals significant differences in the average achievement levels of students between states, suggesting that the quality of educational outcomes is far from equal across the country.
•In a number of States, NAS results also show much diversity in achievement between students in the highest and lowest performing categories.
• Despite the significant differences in methodology, NAS confirms the findings from a number of other studies such as ASER, Educational Initiatives etc. and identifies poor learning outcomes as the biggest challenge facing Indian education.
• Poor quality of learning at the primary school stage naturally spills over to the secondary stage, where the gaps get wider; and continues to the college years, leading to very poor outcomes in the higher education sector.
•This inevitably leads to students being rendered incapable of taking full advantage of educational opportunities.

Key features of the NAS-2017
    •    The present (2017) survey is linked to the learning outcomes.
    •    NAS at the elementary level was based on the Learning Outcomes developed by the NCERT.
    •    Under the NAS the learning gaps will be identified in all the districts of the country.
    •    Findings from the NAS will be used for formulating policies, planning and pedagogical interventions to improve student learning.
    •    It is not designed to assess the individual student performance.
    •    This NAS was conducted for the Classes 3, 5 and 8 in government and government aided schools.
    •    The design and implementation of the survey included in its ambit the school leaders, teachers and the whole network of officials at the Cluster, Block, District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the Directorates of Education in the different States/ UTs.  
    •    The survey tools used multiple test booklets with 45 questions in Classes III and V related to language, mathematics and 60 questions in Class VIII in Mathematics, Language, Sciences and Social Sciences.
    •    The competency based test questions developed, reflected the Learning Outcomes developed by the NCERT which were recently incorporated in the RTE Act by the Government of India.
    •    There is no much variation in the scores of children belonging to social categories such as SC, ST, OBC and General.
    •    There is no much variation in the scores of children from schools having government and private management.