Post-Covid learning assessment of school children: A Project by CRY & RILM across four states

TL;DR

This study assesses the learning recovery of 4000 children across four Indian states post-COVID-19, introducing a new scoring measure to evaluate student progress over three quarters in reading and math.

Contribution

It proposes a novel comprehensive score for measuring student improvement accounting for class lag and provides an analysis of performance progression across gender and states.

Findings

Students showed varied improvement levels across subjects and states.

Gender and state differences significantly affected learning progression.

The new score effectively summarizes inter-quarter student performance.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic struck education system around the globe and initiated an immediate and complete lockdown of all the educational institutions, to maintain social distancing. CRY (Child Rights and You) in collaboration with RILM (Rotary India Literacy Mission) initiated a project to assess the learning abilities of 4000 children across four states: Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Manipur and West Bengal. Every child was provided with the books of appropriate class according to their age in order to test their competency in reading and basic calculation as well and thereafter the compatible class was determined. The assessments were carried over 3 quarters in 4 subjects: oral assessments in 1st Language, 2nd Language and Mathematics and a writing assessment and a binary variable for improvement or no improvement (1/0) was provided. This paper suggests a measure which gives a unique score for improvement level of students with varied class lag since it will not be a desirable idea to grade the students with varied class lags on the same basis. This paper also investigates and evaluates the progression of student performance over the 3 quarters, suggests the use of a comprehensive score measure for summarising the inter-quarter performance. The analysis of progression has been carried out by gender and state level for male-female and inter state comparison respectively.