Oral Assessment at Mini-schools in Oct 2021

This report is written by Rajaraman Krishnan, Asha Chennai Coordinator.

Oral assessments were once again conducted at our mini-schools just before they close in October 2021.

Background:

Asha Chennai has been conducting assessments at all the schools that we support every year. Schools all over India have been closed since March 2020 and they are planning to open all over Tamilnadu on Nov 1st 2021. Visit our mini-schools page to see details about these as well as reports on their activities.
We conducted one at our mini-schools as well last year.

Read about our rationale for the assessments and how we conduct them in 2016 oral assessment report. The goals were quite different for our oral assessment in our mini-schools. For details regarding this, please read our 2020 oral assessment report.

Goals of the Oral Assessment 2021

Mini-schools were initially started as a stop-gap arrangement. However, as time passed and the schools did not open, it became the only education most of the students in our mini-school got in the last one and a half years.

Like we mentioned in the last year’s report, there are many challenges in assessing the performance of the mini-schools or the students at the mini-schools.

There are wide variations among children who were coming to our mini-schools. There are children from Asha supported government schools, other government and govt aided schools, private schools (both matriculation and CBSE).

The kind of facilities available at a mini-school also varies greatly. Mini-schools that have been functioning inside schools or in a stable building tend to have good facilities. Other schools that function in teachers homes and under trees are worse.

There are also differences in when the mini-schools were started. Some have been continuously running since June 2020 with just a summer break. But some were started only this year.
Even when a mini-school has been continuously running since last year, the children may have started coming there only recently.

Therefore, comparing mini-schools to identify which was doing well and which needed improvement was not going to be easy. Like last year we had other goals in mind for these oral assessments. We conducted the oral assessments with the following goals in mind.

For students that are continuing in mini-schools from last year, we can measure their progress. This will help us see if the individual students have progressed from last year.
We can also compare the performance of students who have been with the mini-school for a minimum of say 1 year against average performance of students across our supported schools in earlier years. This will help us check whether the mini-schools are able to teach as much to children as the typical schools do during regular school years.
Very importantly for this year this will provide us data for mini-school students. If we are able to conduct oral assessments in the schools once they reopen, we will have a way to compare children who have been to mini-schools with children who haven’t had that opportunity.
Like last year, this year to we will be able to compare private school students with government school students.
Like previous years, we can once again collect student data like father’s education, mother’s education, details of their preschool education, attendance, height, weight, date of birth etc. This will help us continue our analysis and understanding of sociological factors affecting education and it will also help us understand these factors in the context of students going to private schools.

We decided to go ahead with the oral assessments and collect all of the above data.

Oral Assessments 2020-21

We conducted the Oral assessments at a total of ?? mini-schools. The coverage for various projects is as follows,

Project Sangamam (Thiruvallur Dists) – 31 mini-schools.
Project Pearl (Thoothukudi Dist) – 11 mini-schools.
Project Thulasi (Viluppuram/Thiruvannamalai Dists) – 8 mini-schools.
Project Poorna Vidhya and Manigal (Chennai) – 5 mini-schools.

Total – 55 mini-schools.

We trained all the teachers who would be conducting these oral assessments via Google meet sessions. We also further had senior teachers in every project who had conducted the assessment for at least a couple of years. The teachers conducted the assessment in pairs with always a senior teacher as part of the pair.

The assessments were conducted during the week of October 18th at all the schools. Only Manigal schools had the oral assessments on Oct 25th. Here are some pictures from Sangamam (Thiruvallur).