Greg Ashman, a teacher and a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, highlights how the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report indicates a shocking decline in the standard of education in not just Australia, but also various other countries. According to him, there has been a long-time decline in Australia in Mathematics and Science scores although reading continues to be consistent.- 1
He draws the reader's attention to the fact that the PISA scores indicate that Finland and Estonia are doing much better. While Poland is on an upward swing, England has improved in Mathematics and Reading while Science scores have declined.
What I found most relevant in Greg's analysis according to the Indian context was his observations regarding how the classroom climate or discipline and the curriculum seemed to be the significant factors that had brought down the PISA scores.
For a teacher and his students what matters the most is to have a conducive and pleasant atmosphere in the class. When noise levels go up, cross-talking takes place then tempers will fray, stress levels will shoot up and then no effective learning can take place. Overcrowded classrooms, a bane and a dampener in most schools in India are so chaotic at times that one wonders if they were merely herding pens for distraught cattle with the teacher are a herder, without, of course, the cattle prod since the so-called guardians of discipline would frown upon the use of any kind of censure on students.
I have noticed how there seems to be a growing restlessness in students who want to get everything in one shot! There is a growing lack of patience in our students today and we are to blame for not maintaining a culture of respect in our students. Somewhere or the other, our curriculum framers have forgotten to add value to the curriculum. Value-based education is what we need in our country today. Education is not simply about scoring centum or perfect scores, rather it is also about building up character. In our rush to get marks in summative assessments, we have forgotten to teach our students the art of deferred gratification as a quality that develops social and emotional skills in our students. I have deliberately used the word "skills" because I very strongly believe that patience and consistency are skills that help us survive in an already restless world! Unfortunately in a culturally diverse country like India, we tend to frown at any form of a values-based curriculum especially if it is based on a particular religious text-so much so for being a "Secular" Nation!
Greg in his article (link posted below) states that very high levels of bullying and classroom disruption hamper learning and this, in turn, has a collective impact on the overall student assessment performance scores at the regional and national levels. Breaking free from the clutches of the laissez-faire culture that reigns today, Greg believes that it is the students themselves, those who have faced bullying that favour more control and discipline in the class!-1
One very important factor that according to Greg determines the quality of education is the "curriculum content". Content that is vague and not broken up into concepts will not be assimilated easily. Having vague content is like having a vision but not a plan to accomplish it. In India, we rushed up without careful thought and introduced CCA or Continuous Comprehension Assessment without being clear about how to manage it, and moreover, we were not really sure about how it would impact student assessment. The haste with which CCA was introduced resulted in chaos and confusion. Standardisation was lost, students were being assessed on the spur of the moment, rubrics were not given, and in many cases, marks and grades were blindly awarded especially when there were seventy or more students to be assessed or when the teacher was clueless about what he or she was testing. A hue and cry took place in the country with parents demanding a rollback of the CCA system. Students' reading and writing scores were dropping and students in grades sixth and seventh barely had the reading and writing abilities of students in grades fourth and fifth. The lack of written assessments from grades first to seventh meant that students who had begun to appear for written assessments at the grade eight level were in a state of shock because now, all of a sudden they were supposed to appear for a written exam of which they had no prior knowledge.
I very strongly believe that curriculum changes should be preceded by stringent testing, dry-runs and thorough research. In many cases, the curriculum has to be country-specific and culture-specific. Very often we rush to copy the educational standards and curriculums of other countries that have shown better standards in education at the school level. We rushed in copying the Australian pattern of education and introduced the CCA pattern of assessment around the year 2008. Our teachers had not even been properly trained, and the chaos that ensued was evident in the dropping grades in writing, reading and calculus. India is a country where students have a tendency to memorise more than explore. They have sound Mathematical skills and don't require calculators in class. Our students can recite poems and speeches without having the need to look at notes on a piece of paper. They are good at "learning by heart". But then any curriculum change should take into consideration the regional strengths and weaknesses of its learners! The removal of written exams at the primary levels meant that students had lost their ability to express themselves in writing. Even today, I see that students have very poor writing skills at the secondary school level. Very few students studying in grades eleven and twelve can write good English - they might speak well but they can't write!
Greg suggests that 'the most effective teachers take an explicit approach to teaching academic subjects". In other words, their concepts are clear and they are able to deconstruct content into tangible and viable units! What we need to do today is to develop a curriculum with content that is 'explicit', units that scaffold each other, and content that is relevant to the times. No student would like to learn stuff that has no relevance to him or her. Students often come up to me asking me about the relevance of learning how to write formal letters in an age of emails or to that effect, reading classical literature in the age of Netflix! The contextual relevance of each unit and each lesson should be made clear from the outset itself. In many cases, relevance depends on how well the curriculum has been framed and how well the teacher has understood it. A sound educational system can only be brought about through careful planning, research and testing. One simply cannot experiment with the educational system and its curriculum. The Finnish and Estonian examples might be tempting to copy, but then they might not really work in the Indian context.-1
The implications for India are serious! In the 2009 PISA report, India scored second last out of 73 countries! Now India will be participating in the 2021 PISA assessment and it is hoped that this participation will help us set a benchmark and move away from rote learning and move towards competency-based learning according to Mr Manish Garg, joint secretary, MHRD, Government of India (according to an article appearing in the Times of India). - 2
It is evident that benchmarks and standardised testing can help us take stock of the standard of education in the country. As an educator who has been on the job for 25 years now, I cannot help but notice how students' written expression, handwriting and neatness of work have been deteriorating rather sharply. Their understanding of syntax and semantics or grammatical structure has shown a steady decline. One of the major grammatical errors committed by students includes subject-verb disagreement and another is the mixing of tense forms (simple present with simple past) or what might be called inconsistency in the choice of tenses. One of the reasons for this decline in written ability could be the shift from the teaching of formal grammar to the teaching of the communicative or interactive approach in the teaching of English. Somewhere down the road, our syllabus framers for the teaching of English might have made a grave error in shifting from the teaching of formal grammar to that of the communicative approach. What most people don't realise is that English happens to be a second language for Indians and that the first language when not a regional language is Hindi. The teaching of formal grammar needs to be re-introduced for two important reasons, firstly that English is a second language and secondly, at times the grammar structure used in Hindi or the regional language might cause confusion in students who tend to think in Hindi while answering a question in English. For example, the Hindi equivalent of reading and studying is padna, while the English has study and read. A student who is thinking in Hindi but writing an answer in English might end up writing, "I am reading in class eight."
The implications for India are serious! In the 2009 PISA report, India scored second last out of 73 countries! Now India will be participating in the 2021 PISA assessment and it is hoped that this participation will help us set a benchmark and move away from rote learning and move towards competency-based learning according to Mr Manish Garg, joint secretary, MHRD, Government of India (according to an article appearing in the Times of India). - 2
It is evident that benchmarks and standardised testing can help us take stock of the standard of education in the country. As an educator who has been on the job for 25 years now, I cannot help but notice how students' written expression, handwriting and neatness of work have been deteriorating rather sharply. Their understanding of syntax and semantics or grammatical structure has shown a steady decline. One of the major grammatical errors committed by students includes subject-verb disagreement and another is the mixing of tense forms (simple present with simple past) or what might be called inconsistency in the choice of tenses. One of the reasons for this decline in written ability could be the shift from the teaching of formal grammar to the teaching of the communicative or interactive approach in the teaching of English. Somewhere down the road, our syllabus framers for the teaching of English might have made a grave error in shifting from the teaching of formal grammar to that of the communicative approach. What most people don't realise is that English happens to be a second language for Indians and that the first language when not a regional language is Hindi. The teaching of formal grammar needs to be re-introduced for two important reasons, firstly that English is a second language and secondly, at times the grammar structure used in Hindi or the regional language might cause confusion in students who tend to think in Hindi while answering a question in English. For example, the Hindi equivalent of reading and studying is padna, while the English has study and read. A student who is thinking in Hindi but writing an answer in English might end up writing, "I am reading in class eight."
Note: Today, as I revisit this article after almost two years of the Pandemic, I notice with horror how seven grade ten students are not aware of the difference between a simple sentence, a compound sentence and a complex sentence. They don't know how to use conjunctions to join clauses and sentences to write effectively by avoiding repetitions. Students are not aware of the use of prepositions. Modals are another puzzle for most of the students in grade ten. They are not aware of the difference between 'should, must, need to' and 'ought to'.
This deterioration in the quality of writing skills in our students is because they are learning English as a second language and they tend to fall back on the structures used in their mother tongue while writing an essay or an article in English. I very strongly advocate the teaching of formal grammar to our students if we really want to improve their standards of writing in English. Grammar rules cannot be inculcated in students who are learning a second language through the Communicative approach! We need to bring back the Grammar book and we need to increase the allocation for Grammar in the syllabus at all levels till grade eleven.
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