Asha Chennai conducted Oral and Written assessments at all our supported schools.

The education at all our supported schools has been affected very badly. Therefore there was a good case to be made to scrap the whole assessment this year. However we felt that it would be good to measure and document the impact. Further we have been anecdotally noticing that children who attended our mini-schools have fared a lot better. We wanted to verify this as well.

After we decided that we will conduct the assessment this year, the next question was whether to conduct oral assessments or written assessments or both. Oral assessments are usually conducted in Oct/Nov of every year. Therefore for the results to be comparable, it will need to be conducted at that time. We couldn’t do that this year because of the closures. However for comparison of performance oral assessment is the best tool. It provides a number that can easily be compared with the numbers from previous years and at our mini-schools. Therefore we decided to go ahead with the oral assessments.

The written assessments are usually held in April and therefore timing-wise it would be appropriate. However, given the battering education has received, we know very well children’s knowledge of various areas in every subject will be weak. If there are areas that have been affected more than others, we felt it will be useful to understand this. We therefore decided to conduct this as well. As the teachers were conducting both oral and written assessments together, it did take a little longer.

This year, the oral assessments were conducted in our Rajatalab project schools as well. From next year we hope to conduct written assessments also at these schools.

Here are photos from our assessments. A more detailed report will be written once the results from these assessments are tallied and analysed.