The Telangana Higher Education Department is reviewing the effectiveness of its online classes after more than half of Classes 11 and 12 students failed the first-year or Class 11 exam, a report in a national daily said on Sunday. The students are now in Class 12, having been promoted en masse as the final exam could not be held in April due to the raging second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. The exams were the first serious one after educational
The Telangana Higher Education Department is reviewing the effectiveness of its online classes after more than half of Classes 11 and 12 students failed the first-year or Class 11 exam, a report in a national daily said on Sunday. The students are now in Class 12, having been promoted en masse as the final exam could not be held in April due to the raging second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. The exams were the first serious one after educational institutions closed on March 25, 2020. The results are yet another illustration of the severe learning loss that has happened across different educational segments and social classes (due to the lack of inadequate online learning infrastructure) — and it is almost a certainty that the situation is the same in all states. The worst hit have been the primary class students. Around 320 million students have not stepped into a classroom for more than a year. Schools started reopening only in July and they have been plagued by closures.
A 2021 field study by the Azim Premji University says the closure of schools (and the failure to open them on priority when the situation improved), has not only led to the complete loss of an academic year, but that most schools are reporting the widespread and alerting phenomenon of “forgetting” , where students do not remember what they learn in a previous class, a regression in their circular learning. This, the study says, includes losing foundational abilities such as reading with understanding and performing addition and multiplication, which they learned earlier and become proficient in, and which form the basis of further learning. These foundational abilities are such that their absence will impact the learning of more complex abilities and conceptual understanding across subjects. In August, a parliamentary standing committee said that most rural, remote areas lack digital facilities, indicating a huge digital divide and added that about “70% of the country doesn’t have access to internet connectivity and available quality of connectivity is poor”. The learning crisis has also been exacerbated by pre-existing education disparities.
While the Union ministry of education has released a Covid-19 response action plan for access, retention and continuous learning, capacity building, and several states are rolling out measures to remedy the situation, there remains a tremendous gap between the aims of the policy and their implementation by the state governments. This gap needs to be reduced quickly with coherent state-level strategies, accentuated vaccine programmes for students, teachers and allied staff, and adequate human resource and financial allocations so that the young don’t end up paying a heavy price for the unanticipated educational disruption.
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