Academics only utilising memory skills of students, says study
LUCKNOW: According to a study carried out by management graduates under ProjectImpact, current academics only utilize the memory skills of students. Other dimensions are severely under utilised.
About 1,500 students from 33 schools in 17 districts of Uttar Pradesh were covered under the comprehensive assessment of Project-Impact. The results of the assessment have not been very encouraging.
On the intelligence front, the average score turns out to be 50% only, lowest being reading comprehension at 33% on an average. Government Girls’ Inter College (GGIC) of a district has scored a miserably low 25% aggregate and only 10% in reading comprehension.
In contrast, students have done fairly well in memory, where the average score turns out to be 79%.
“In one of the rarest assessments on behavioural studies, this report further points out that our students are lacking the most necessary qualities required for success, like leadership, motivation, self-discipline and confidence,” said Saurabh Pratap Singh, IIM, Ranchi, 2012 batch.
Almost each category of sample schools has scored very low (50-53%) on behavioural studies. The study on this front doesn’t have major variations across different categories of schools.
Project-Impact has highlighted these crucial weaknesses through a well researched comprehensive assessment package. But it has not stopped at identifying the issues only.
It has also ventured into providing supportive ecosystem for conducive learning environment in schools, like providing training to teachers on the ‘Science of Learning and Teaching’, conducting workshops for students on leadership, motivation and other important behavioural issues, preparing school development programmes, sensitising management and decision-making authorities of schools and conducting workshops for parents.
The Impact teams have shared their findings with governor Ram Naik and deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma.
The teams claimed both Naik and Sharma expressed deep appreciation for the efforts and invited them to discuss the findings in detail for taking corrective measures in the assessment policy, if any.
The teams also found that the education system, in due course, had devised the ‘hierarchy of subjects’. It made science and mathematics much more important than literature and social studies.
The harm in such orientation is that the citizens-in-the- making (students) are mostly deprived of remaining values of education.
Project-Impact was started to deal with faulty assessment. Its basic premise has been the value-generation-categories of education and it wants to assess how students are faring on these.