The district unit of the Samagra Shiksha, Kerala, has launched an initiative to identify learning gaps caused by COVID-19 among students, develop ways to address these, and equip teachers to provide students’ support.
A status study with these objectives was taken up in 125 schools in the district with the participation of school teachers. Nearly 600 students were involved in this assessment.
Samagra Shiksha officials say that more than identifying learning gaps and codifying them, the main attempt of the study was to equip teachers to identify learning gaps so that they could help students overcome these.
Assessment activities for various subjects from Class 3 to 7 were prepared and using these an evaluation of students was conducted.
For instance, if the topic being covered in class is ecosystems, the children are very likely to know the impact of human activities on ecosystems owing to what they had been taught earlier and even the online classes provided during the pandemic. However, to gauge their process skills such as questioning, investigating, and interpreting, the students will be tasked with finding out if the ecosystems in a village have been affected owing to human intervention, how to go about this research, the tools they will employ, how to study the aftereffects, what the findings are, how to analyse them, and how to record these.
The questions and formats prepared by each student in their quest will be studied and students’ academic levels ascertained on the basis of certain indicators. While some students may have recorded the ecosystems accurately and entirely on their own, some may have had partial success. Others may have required help and some others may not have been successful despite having help.
Again, they may have used observation, survey, interviews and reference for their study, but some may have used only a few techniques, and others will have needed help. Same for result analysis or formats for data collection.
Using these, it will have to be decided if any changes have to be made in the process skills to address the common problems identified among the students, how these can be applied by teachers to other areas to assess students, and if any special activities have to be undertaken to address problems and how to implement them. Any support that is needed will be provided by Samagra Shiksha.
The study results will be shared with all schools so that teachers can assess their students and implement activities to address them. They will also be used to improve Samagra projects such as Hello English and Ullasaganitham.
The initiative, launched at the Varkala block resource centre, has been expanded across the district, and will be shared at the State level too, they say.
