Cognitive talent search Olympiad to be held in over 13,000 TN govt schools

CHENNAI: In January, the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TNSDC) and the Department of School Education will conduct a ‘cognitive talent search olympiad’ in 13,500 government schools across the State to assess the cognitive skills of students from classes 6 to 8.

For the same, TNSDC has awarded a tender to a firm to create a gamified platform to conduct the olympiad. Through this, students will be tested on 14 concepts, including divided attention, processing speed, logical reasoning, and more.

Speaking to DT Next, a TNSDC higher official said, “We selected the firm early December and the work order has already been given. But, the olympiad for the middle school students will be conducted in January after the platform is designed.”

“Every student will undergo the test and the firm will give TNSDC a dashboard to track high performers. Also, the olympiad will be conducted in a phased manner at the hi-tech labs of the schools,” the official added.

The olympiad is conducted by TNSDC under the Naan Mudhalvan scheme, which works on enhancing industry-relevant skills among youth. And, the cognitive talent search olympiad is specifically being conducted among middle school students of classes 6,7 and 8 to identify and nurture cognitive talents at an early stage of school education.

Further, the objective of this olympiad is to provide skill-based interventions and cross-mentoring opportunities to the students. An education official noted that such a test will help in creating a detailed talent profile of each student, which will help the department and ward in future.

And, the firm which has been selected to develop a gamified platform includes a framework with efficient rubrics and detailed scoring mechanisms to accurately evaluate student performance, the official said.

And, the organising bodies such as TNSDC and the school education department will review if the quality of questions, answer choices, competency alignment, appropriateness, difficulty level, and language relevance for the specified grades, will meet the required standards.

The selected firm will design and implement a comprehensive platform which can evaluate the students on different components on a rigorous assessment framework.

The students will be assessed on skill assessment, which includes critical thinking and reflexivity. The test will be held through open-ended questions, case studies and scenario-based questions.

And, the other factors that the middle school students will be assessed on include; concept understanding, problem-solving, logical reasoning, auditory processing, visual processing, processing speed, attention to detail, divided attention, aptitude assessment, memory evaluation, confidence level assessment, psychometric evaluation and programming hackathons.

And, the olympiad is designed to be student-friendly and time-efficient. Each phase of the olympiad will be for an hour and will contain no more than 40 questions.

The assessment format has been designed to ensure that it is comprehensive yet manageable within the allotted time, thus reducing student fatigue and maintaining high engagement levels.

An education department official further noted, "The whole process has been divided into pre-olympiad, go-live phase. In the first phase, the schools will be shortlisted and students’ data will be validated to conduct mock tests. Secondly, the olympiad will be conducted in hi-tech labs, while tracking performance metrics in real-time.”

The data collected and the outcome of each students' cognitive skills will help in providing better skill based intervention to make them industry ready, the official added.