Credible long-term performance measurement can be a powerful lever to transform systems. There’s a compelling case that the National Assessment Survey (NAS) (now PARAKH), administered nationwide by the NCERT, can be one such longitudinal data source. Started in 2001, it is a large-scale representative sample assessment of student learning outcomes in Grades 3, 5, 8, and 10, and is conducted every three years.
A big frustration about school education policy making in India is the absence of credible learning outcomes data that can be compared over time and across geographies, and also which can be used to generate actionable insights for education system managers. The NAS can be an excellent source to address this deficiency. It can become the definitive source of data to design both pedagogy and school education policies at both national and, more importantly, at the state government levels.
But this would require certain important changes in the design, administration, and analysis of NAS/PARAKH. In particular, the following six measures are critical.
1. The NAS should be conducted every year. The most useful takeaway from such surveys is often the directional trends with important parameters. Three years is too long a period for this data to generate meaningful and actionable takeaways.
2. Instead of primarily being a mechanism for the Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India, to compare performance across states, it should become a tool for state governments to understand where their schools stand and improve their education systems. India is too large and too diverse (in terms of the baseline of educational outcomes) to be able to derive meaningful, actionable inferences from nationwide surveys. Comparisons across states need only be a secondary outcome.
3. Instead of being a centrally administered test, it may be more appropriate for NAS to be administered by state governments. This is necessary to ensure ownership by the state governments. To ensure the objectives are not compromised, it can be done by contracting with independent testing agencies using a standardised set of instruments. The contracts should be for 3-5 years to build capabilities, including at the supply side.
ASER, for example, samples 600 households in each district through a two-stage randomisation process - 30 villages in the district and 20 households in each village. PARAKH 2024 was administered to 2.29 million students across 75,565schools. Tablets and digital technologies can be used extensively to administer these tests effectively.
MoE can issue guidance on the instruments, administration and scoring of the tests, selection of independent agencies (including model RFP, contract agreement, etc.), analysis of the test scores/performance data, and analysis of the instruments for academic learning. This guidance can also help ensure comparability of the test data from different states.
Alternatively, the NCERT must figure out ways to conduct the test in a collaborative mode with state governments and with their full ownership. This may be difficult given the legacy and NCERT’s own incentives and institutional culture.
4. It should have two objectives: to evaluate test performance and to improve pedagogy. The former will be done by analysing the test scores, and the latter by analysing the responses in the instruments. The current NAS does little (or nothing) to directly address the latter. There’s a strong case that the latter is arguably more important.
5. The test scores data should allow for the comparison of grade-wise and subject-wise performance across blocks and districts, and provide actionable insights for administrative-side improvement interventions/measures (analysis based on blocks, subjects, grades, gender, social groups, management, etc.).
6. The student responses in the instruments, especially when they make mistakes, can offer important insights about how children understand concepts, and can help with academic-side improvements. It can help identify the most common types of mistakes made by students in each concept, and even why they are making those mistakes. This analysis can be used to create subject-wise and grade-wise libraries of the common mistakes for concepts mapped to the respective lessons.
Given the critical importance of understanding concepts in achieving learning outcomes, this library can be an invaluable pedagogic tool for teachers. It can help teachers to make lesson plans and tailor their pedagogy to pre-emptively address the common misconceptions and mistakes that students tend to make. This library can be appropriately digitised and made available on Apps for teachers and students to engage with these concepts.
The national and state councils for education research and training could build a body of pedagogic practices to remediate these common learning misconceptions and mistakes. The NCERT could develop a mechanism to bring together and compile a library of good pedagogic practices,
This can be called the Science of Learning (SoL) library, and can be continuously updated from the analysis of the emerging data from each NAS. It’s unlikely to vary significantly across states and can even be developed as a central SoL library by the NCERT and then made available to state governments to customise and adapt for their respective contexts. It can be a powerful global public good generated by India and is very useful in addressing the global challenge of lagging student learning outcomes.
The NAS/PARAKH instruments can be analysed to generate these academic-side insights. They must be shared with state governments. Given the effort put into administering NAS and its longitudinal nature, it is a great opportunity that must not be wasted.
For a start, NCERT could share the instruments with state governments so that at least some interested states could analyse them to generate some versions of SoL libraries. The NCERT itself could create a dedicated unit with resources to analyse its vast repository of NAS student responses and build a SoL library on the lines mentioned above.
A more comprehensive and practical agenda for school education reforms, covering these and more, aimed directly at improving student learning outcomes, is outlined here.
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