Chennai: In a promising show, class 10 students from Tamil Nadu have performed well in National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2018 to lift the state from the bottom of the table to 18th overall rank in the current survey.
In all five subjects, the students from the state have given 38.18 per cent correct answers slightly better than the national average - 38.08 per cent.
While Tamil Nadu students performed well in Modern Indian Language and Social Science, the performance in Maths, Science and English is still below the national average.
The National Achievement Survey 2018 was conducted on February 5, 2018, across the country and 85,398 students took part in the test from the state.
Among the districts, Kanyakumari tops the list with 42.18 per cent of students giving correct answers and it was followed by Coimbatore with 41.69 per cent and Erode with 41.26 per cent.
“Due to the intervention programmes conducted by RMSA and SCERT, the state has jumped 12 places to reach 18th place this year. After the previous NAS results, the state government has introduced concept based coaching in the classrooms for classes 9 and 10,” said G.Arivoli, director, State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT).
There was a huge gap between the state average and national average in the National Achievement Survey 2015. But, the school education department was able to bridge that gap in the second cycle of the survey.
It has evolved a new method for concept-based coaching and trained the teachers from class 6 to 10 on concept mapping skills.
But still, the students in the class 10 could not fare better than the national average in Maths, Science and English. In these subjects students gave 30.95 per cent correct answers in Maths (national average 33.05 per cent), 33.54 per cent in science (national average 34.13 per cent) and 35.51 per cent in English (national average 37.81 per cent).
Mr.Arivoli said, “Bringing these students on par with the national level itself was a big challenge. More or less we have achieved it in the current survey and to improve our rankings we have to sustain the training and concept based coaching in the classrooms.”
The previous national achievement survey conducted in 2015 was a content-based test whereas the present survey tested the students' skills which had made it even more difficult.
According to Aid India joint secretary M.Damodaran, who is working with government schools for the last several years on improving the learning outcome, the issue starts as early as the primary education.
“The class 2 students are expected to read a paragraph of eight lines. But, more than 50% of the students from 5th standard could not read it. The third class students have to do divisions, but only 33% of the class 6 students are able to do it. There was no focus on remedial coaching as they move to higher classes,” he said.
Many students lack the foundation skills from both government and private schools in rural areas. They cannot learn all the skills in one year.
“The state government should replace exams with the skill-based assessment. All the students passing out class 5 should have attained some basic skills in language, maths, science and social science. The exams have to focus on the learning outcomes instead of testing the content,” he suggested.
Professors who involved with the national achievement survey said, “If we have to do better in NAS, our classrooms have to be transformed from content-based coaching to skill-based coaching.”
NCERT is currently evolving the post-NAS intervention for all the states. “We need to implement those suggestions wholeheartedly to achieve better results in the next survey,” he concluded.
