These games do not use numbers. For instance, you have two cards. One has more dots than another and you ask kids to identify which one has more. These were developed at Harvard University and tested out only in laboratory settings on tablets initially. J-PAL took those ideas from that setting and put them into south Shahdara and Pratham bālvādis (children’s centres) in Trilokpuri [both in Delhi] to test outcomes in developing countries.
The interesting thing is that the performance of children in Trilokpuri versus children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, is quite similar at the pre-school level. But when you follow them through after a couple of years in school, you find that our children do a lot worse. Duflo’s interpretation is that school maths in India doesn’t build on the intuitive, instinctive maths skills at the pre-school age. That again outlines that the problem is not with our kids but with what we expect them to do once they enter school.
The government is planning to reduce the national board syllabus in two to three years, according to this February 26, 2018, statement. Do you think that will help?
I need to understand first what “reducing syllabus” means. For me, it’s not a quantity thing. What ASER’s or MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee’s or Esther Duflo’s work shows is that whatever we are expecting of children in school tends to target the top of the class.
If I look at ASER data, the reading test is a Grade II test. If you ask how many students can do that in Grade III and look at the data from 2014 across states, you see a huge variation. So, Himachal is the best, where 50% of students are at this level or higher (we don’t know what higher is because we don’t measure it) and another 25% are able to read paragraphs quite frequently. Hence, teaching at grade level makes sense in Himachal. But at the bottom of the pile is Uttar Pradesh (UP), where only about 7% kids can actually read Grade II texts. Now, in UP’s case teaching at grade level makes no sense. As many as 93% of students are nowhere close to learning what you are teaching them.
Given this, we need to think what the role of the first couple of years in school is. If it is to build a solid foundation, you have to define what that foundation consists of and do whatever it takes to get them to that level. You may need to use different methods, different kinds of groupings.
Pratham has been doing pedagogical experiments where we have successfully trained practically everybody by the time they reach Grade II: they are able to not only read at that level but also write stories. It’s not a question of quantity or reduction or expansion. If my goal is that every child should read, then I will work towards that goal. If my goal is that a child should be able to say what she thinks, then we create opportunities for that to happen. So I don’t know what that announcement meant and we need to go deeper into it. Sometimes headlines give you a short form of what was meant. I don’t want to comment on it without knowing exactly what is being planned.
Also, I have seen an announcement asking for our thoughts on this. So this is an opportunity to say that we feel quite strongly that there should be stage-wise, clear goals. There is no big rush. Everybody now has a long life. So if by the end of Grade V you are able to read most things, ask questions on them, formulate your own thoughts and do some basic computations, I think that foundation is quite strong to build on.
It’s also important--from [what we understand after] all these years of doing ASER and what we do in Pratham--that parents understand what their children’s goals are. Only then will parents support and participate in a big way. We wouldn’t have got universal schooling if everybody didn’t understand what going to school meant. And so, I think we are at a stage where everybody needs to understand what learning means. Learning cannot be explained to parents in bullet points about outcomes. You might do that for schools, but for parents you have to explain it in broad terms.
To Be Continue - part-4
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