Asha Chennai conducted oral assessments in Nov 2022 at all our supported schools. It covered about 15000 children from the 150 schools that we support.
Asha usually conducts an oral assessment in Nov and then a written assessment in Feb/Mar of an academic year for the students in our supported schools. This year too we conducted our Oral assessment in Nov. This year we tentatively extended it to cover the middle school students as well. It was made optional for the schools to participate in this. But I was glad that most of the schools chose to participate in this.
Training for the oral assessments was held on the 12th of November for all the teachers in Tamilnadu. We held the training from Thiruvallur and teachers from Poorna Vidhya, Thulasi and Pearl participated in this over GoogleMeet. We later held a separate training for the teachers in UP on the 20th. The oral assessments started in Tamilnadu at all our project locations on the 14th. Most of the assessments complete by that week itself. The remaining few were also wrapped up by the week of Nov 21st. At the eight UP schools, the oral assessments were done during the week of Nov 21st. This was a massive exercise spanning about 150 villages spanning one district in UP and 8 districts in Tamilnadu and covering close to 15000 students! It has now been successfully completed.
To handle this scale, we have taken steps to automate as much of the process as possible, Our Kanini server now provides links for teachers and administrators to the the following,
- Download the data for this year (students’ names and details) created using data from previous years when assessments have been held at that school.
- Submit a filled in or partially filled in oral assessment master file. The server will validate the file and interact with the teachers to sort out the errors. Hard errors have to be fixed. Soft errors may either be fixed or the teacher may say that the data is valid and proceed with the submission.
- Administrators will be able to view the status of all these submissions and perform various further steps on this.
- Check the submissions of the teachers, the errors they got etc. Revert a submitted file back to the teachers if there are other problems with the data.
- Process the submission and upload the data into the DB.
This will soon be extended to handle the written assessments as well. As this is a fairly big development, there have been several minor bugs in it and these are being sorted out. From next year onwards, this will significantly reduce the time required from teachers as well as administrators.
Here are some photos of the oral assessments at all our locations.