Grade Appropriate Learning

Uttarkahnd is known as Education hub, as India's best schools and training institutes are located in the state. The State’s literacy rate has increased from 71% in 2001 to 79.6% in 2011^[1] which is higher than the national literacy rate of 74%.  However, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)^[2] has been tracking achievement level of students on a nation-wide basis for some years now, and findings for Uttarkahnd are not positive. Amongst Class 5 children, only 59% (51% in government schools and 70% in private schools) could read a Class 2 level text book. This indicates considerable deterioration from achievement levels in 2009 (68% overall, 62% among government and 80% amongst private school children). Similar results are visible in Maths: in Class 5 children only 32% (29% in government and 50% in private schools) could do division. In 2009, the corresponding percentages were 43, 41 and 60 respectively. It is evident that children’s learning levels are deteriorating, instead of improving.

With this background in mind, the structure of our program focuses not only on developing basic literacy skills through activity based learning in children, but also focuses on increasing curiosity, problem solving skills, critical thinking and life skills development through our library, sports for development and ‘We learn English’ Program. The idea is to increase engagement by providing quality education to the students, which in turn will lead to increased attendance and enrollment in government schools.

Assessment

Annual Status of Education Report or ASER is a standardized test to assess children’s basic learning levels in reading and arithmetic. ASER is a floor level test. It does not assess children using grade level tools. This year we conducted the ASER test as a baseline in Oct 2016. To measure the progress, we conducted a similar end line in the month of March 2017

Reading and Reading Comprehension (Hindi)

How to Read this Table

Each cell shows the highest level of reading achieved by a child. For eg. In Std. II only 12% of total students tested cannot even recognize letters, 30% can recognize letters, 14% can read words, 8% can read a simple paragraph, 12% can read a story and only 23% can read a story with understanding or comprehension.

Each cell shows the highest level in arithmetic achieved by a child. For eg. In std. II, 11% of the students tested cannot even recognize numbers, 39% can only recognize numbers from 1-9, 33% can recognize numbers upto 99, 17% can do subtraction with borrowing and no child can do 1 digit division. For each class, the total of these exclusive categories is 100%.