School closures led to regression: Parliamentary panel

NEW DELHI: School closure has led to massive learning loss and “widespread regression” among students in what they had learnt in previous classes, a parliamentary standing committee said on Friday. The panel said students and teachers must be vaccinated so that schools can be reopened. The parliamentary standing committee on education told the government to take steps to reduce digital inequality and put in place an “accentuated vaccine policy” for teachers, students and other staff to ensure schools can gradually reopen. The panel also urged the government to adopt new blended teaching methods for schools in every district, and tie up with the IT ministry for providing better and cheaper broadband access to rural students, besides changing the evaluation system.the Centre must also initiate a national impact assessment study quickly to gauge the quantum of learning loss, it added. “…School closures have resulted in loss of not only curricular learning, but given rise to a widespread phenomenon of regression (forgetting) by students of learning from the previous class. This includes loss of foundational learning abilities, such as reading with understanding and performing addition and multiplication, which they had learnt earlier and had become proficient in. This regression in curricular learning will impact learning of not only more complex abilities but also conceptual understanding across subjects leading to a cumulative loss over the years impacting academic performance in school years and their future learning in college,” the committee said in its report submitted in Parliament.