30% CHILDREN MISS NAS TEST DUE TO SMOG

CHANDIGARH: About 65,000 school students in Punjab took the test held by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) on Monday to assess how much they have learned.

A total of 90,000 pupils of Classes 3, 5 and 8 were to take part in the assessment-based survey in 3,500-odd government and private schools in the state, but many of them missed it due to smog. “About 25 to 30% of students could not participate due to smog. We are collecting information from each school and the exact number will be known only late in the evening or tomorrow morning,” Punjab State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) deputy director Maninder Sarkaria told Hindustan Times.

He said the National Achievement Survey (NAS) would help assess the schoolchildren’s learning outcomes and help identify the gaps to enable the department take more targeted interventions.

In every district, 61 schools were selected for classes 3 and 5, and 51 schools for class 8, assessing not more than 30 pupils from each of the three classes.

The school education department and SCERT held the assessment as part of the largest ever survey of schoolchildren’s learning outcomes in the country. NCERT, which had drawn up a class-wise chart of expected learning outcomes and sent it to the state a few months ago, set the test papers.