Learning with understanding

Anjali Mittal: EDUCATIONAL Initiatives (EI) is an effort by a group of IIM (Ahmadabad) alumni with first-hand experience of setting up and running educational institutions. It has been formed with a mission to work towards qualitative improvement in India’s educational system.

EI focuses on assessment and learning outcomes measurement in school education. EI creates and administers the ASSET Test, India’s largest diagnostic test that is taken by over 3,50,000 students everywhere.

Unlike regular tests which try only to find out how much a child knows (or has memorized), ASSET measures how well a student has understood concepts and gives detailed feedback on the same, to help them improve.

Thus ASSET helps each student know whether she has actually understood a concept early on so that immediate action can be taken. Often students have conceptual gaps which increase as they progress and when they reach the higher classes, they develop a “phobia” for the subject.

“We believe that significantly improved student learning can happen only through systematic research into learning which includes assessment, as well as areas like misconception research.” says Sudhir Ghodke, director, Educational Initiatives (EI).

When asked about the importance of external assessment in today’s education system, Mr. Ghodke narrated an incident, “The class 5 going daughter of a scientist told him that she had learnt in her Geography class that: the “difference between the earth’s equatorial circumference and polar circumference is 72 kms”. Impressed, he asked her what she understood by equatorial circumference. She said she did not know. And by polar circumference? Again, she was not sure. Circumference? She had no idea. In desperation, he asked her “then what do you know?” “I know that the difference between the earth’s equatorial circumference and polar circumference is 72 kms, that is all that they are going to ask in the exam”, came the prompt reply.”

School tests – including board exams – tend to be superficial, testing what children have memorized. But the important skills like the ability to think independently and reason logically – critical in today’s world – are often not emphasized in school tests.

Leveraging from the understanding of student learning gained from various large scale research projects and classroom interviews, EI has developed a digital adaptive self learning Math programme called ‘MINDSPARK’ for students.

Mindspark is a computer-based adaptive self-learning programme. It is a learning system that allows each student to learn at the pace he/she is comfortable with. In Mindspark, the student is not learning passively by listening to someone, or viewing ready-made solutions, but learning interactively by answering questions of progressively increasing complexity levels. At the heart of Mindspark is the theory, successfully tested in experiments worldwide, that students learn best when they control the pace of learning. Mindspark is a genesis of various such experiments.

Some of the other projects of EI include projects on student learning and assessment with Google, the Government of Bhutan, World Bank, Harvard University and many Indian state governments.

EI is working continuously and dedicatedly to fulfill its noble vision of creating ‘a world where children everywhere are LEARNING with UNDERSTANDING.’

EI has been conducting seminars and discussions with different stakeholders in Education system like Teachers, Parents, school management, Principals and policy makers in India and in different parts of the world to hold up a mirror to society and the education system, showing – in clearer and more undeniable terms than ever before – where we are and that it is very different from the goal we want to reach.

There was a principal’s seminar in August this year organized for the first time in Bangladesh, with an objective to make learning with understanding accessible to all children across the globe. Our goal is to have an education system in which children develop holistic skills and values, which make them both employable and active participants in the process of social change and progress.

The topic, at the recent seminar was ‘HELPING EVERY CHILD LEARN WITH UNDERSTANDING’. A large gathering of educationists from well known schools in Dhaka and Chittagong interacted quite informally and openly during the entire 3 hours duration of the seminar.

The seminar was aimed at sharing the ASSET team’s experience of working with over 3,000 private and over 20,000 public schools, all over India and abroad in the past 9 years. It was highly interactive with most of the delegates participating in meaningful discussions in the present educational system & how we can all contribute significantly towards improving the learning standards amongst our children as early as in the formative years.