E-Paper
Are we building resilient learners?
This article is authored by Akshay Jain, director of projects (Academic), Kruu.
Every February, as board exams approach, a familiar ritual grips Indian households. Timetables go up on bedroom walls, coaching schedules tighten, and a single number — the aggregate score — comes to stand in for a child’s worth, ability and future. We have built one of the most examination-intensive school cultures in the world. The uncomfortable question is whether it produces what we think it does. Are we raising young people who can learn, or young people who are merely good at being tested?
These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters more than we admit. In a widely cited review, cognitive scientists Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork drew a sharp line between performance and learning: How a student does during instruction, or on an exam, is an unreliable indicator of what they have actually retained and can use later.
Academic achievement and learning ability draw on overlapping but genuinely different skill sets — the first rewards recall under pressure and pattern-matching to known question types; the second rewards curiosity, transfer, and the patience to sit with a problem that has no model answer.
This would matter less if the cost were confined to test day. It is not. A substantial body of research finds that the harder a system leans on high-stakes examinations, the more it crowds out the very capacities universities and employers now prize. In an influential synthesis of 49 studies, education researcher Wayne Au found that high-stakes testing reliably narrows what is taught, fragments knowledge into testable fragments, and pushes classrooms toward recall and away from higher-order thinking.
Exam-driven classrooms also tend to reward a performance mindset, where the aim is to look capable and avoid mistakes, over a mastery mindset that treats errors as useful information. Creativity and adaptability need precisely the opposite conditions: permission to experiment, to be wrong, and to try again.
The mismatch is not abstract. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 finds analytical thinking to be the single most sought-after skill, named essential by seven in ten employers — followed immediately by resilience, flexibility and creative thinking. India’s own data tells the same story from the other end. Successive India Skills Reports, which assess lakhs of graduates each year, have found only about half to be readily employable — and the shortfall is consistently less about subject knowledge than about communication, problem-solving and the ability to apply what one knows. Students can clear the examinations and still arrive at the workplace missing precisely the skills those examinations never measured.
The remedy is not difficult Experiential and project-based learning — where students build, test and defend something real — turns knowledge from a thing to be retrieved into a thing to be used. Consider a brief that asks middle-schoolers to design a foldable, low-cost house that could be assembled quickly to ease the shortage of affordable homes. The content is rigorous, but it is learned in the act of doing.
Cognitive scientists call the productive struggle this involves a desirable difficulty — harder in the moment, but far stickier over time.
None of this argues for abolishing examinations. Assessment measures something real, and rigour matters. The argument is narrower: a system that measures only outcomes will keep producing excellent test-takers while under-investing in learners — and the gap shows up precisely where it counts, in the years after school ends.
India has, on paper, already chosen the other path. The National Education Policy 2020 calls explicitly for a move away from rote memorisation toward conceptual understanding, critical thinking and experiential learning. Yet the day-to-day machinery of schooling — timetables, coaching, the social weight of the board result — remains organised around the examination. Resilient learners and good test-takers were never enemies. But if we are honest about which one we have spent decades optimising for, we already know which one now needs our attention.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Akshay Jain, director of projects (Academic), Kruu.
