Experts to assess govt school students’ progress

The appointed experts will help the assessment panel analyse the learning process and identify concepts that students of classes 1-12 in government and government-aided schools across the State face difficulties understanding. The assessment will be done in over 45,000 government schools involving 66 lakh students besides the participation of more than 3 lakh teachers.

A senior official from the School Education Department told DT Next that assessments are the most foolproof way of tracking students’ progress and the initiative will ensure quality of appraisals is improved while empowering government school teachers and students to create localised assessments.

“Additionally, the initiative would ensure that data collected from the assessments is analysed and it drives decision-making processes at the zone, block, district, and State-level,” he added.

Explaining further, the official said for every subject and grade, a team of content specialists will be responsible for working under the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) closely guided by school teachers. Pointing out that the questions will be created by teachers, he said for each question created, the experts will ensure that the quality of the question, the answer choices, competency, appropriateness, difficulty level, and language used are relevant for the grade.

“The questions, both in Tamil and English, will not be similar to the test pattern in schools. The subject-wise questions will have the content of each portion and students will be asked which component is hard and easy,” the official added.

Thereafter, the students’ assessment report card will be prepared and teachers will concentrate more on those requiring more help. The assessment will be done every quarter through computer labs and a separate software will also be developed to generate the grade-wise report. The assessment could also be done manually in case there are glitches in the labs, officials said.