Assessment Reform (AR)
Piramal School of Leadership aims to develop assessment as the foundation for an equitable and inclusive education ecosystem making children future-ready.
Assessment is a process that helps focus our attention on what matters the most in education. The quality of assessments designed and conducted is directly related to the quality of instructional practices within the classroom. In the quest to improve the quality of education, an effective and comprehensive assessment system enables teachers, officials, educators, and policymakers to make informed choices by seeking how well students are learning.
Outdated approaches to formative assessment
Stakeholders lack proficiency in 21st-century assessment design
Absence of automation hampers performance
Solution
Aims to establish student assessments as foundation for education reform, addressing each child's learning needs. It envisions creating an assessment cell to reform systems and processes by strengthening institutions, stakeholders, and middle management through:
- System Strengthening: Establish specialized units with cascade model, building infrastructure to design and implement 360-degree practices, establishing project management unit (PMU’s) for effective governance and sustainability
- People Strengthening Developing capacity building curriculum for assessment cadre on 21st cc assessments, developing subject matter experts for implementation future ready assessments, setting up Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) through Live Action Plan (LAP’s)
- Tech Integration: Tech enabled processed for driving learner-centric insights for policy making, MLE systems to ensure transparency and reliability of reforms, and developing assessment portals as warehouse of 21st cc domain assessment tools
- Holistic Product Integration: Integrating Holistic progress card (HPC) to include cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains furthering a whole child development approach to student assessment, using School-based assessment (SBA) to serve as key lever in realising this vision.
Interventions
- Assessment interventions aim to strengthen government institutions by promoting a 21st Century Competency (21st CC) assessment narrative through policy-level reforms.
- Focus on designing and implementing 21st CC assessment initiatives via continuous professional development.
- Assessment curriculum is integrated into the institution's academic calendar to ensure alignment with learning goals.
- Emphasis on developing and integrating tech solutions to enhance governance and M&E systems.
- Tech-enabled systems ensure data-based continuous feedback and real-time inputs.
- The ultimate goal is to enable large-scale, sustainable impact through effective, competency-based assessment practices.
Impact
Has successfully created partnerships with government stakeholders across 4 states - Rajasthan, J&K, Odisha and Jharkhand - supporting across institutional, process refinement and capacity building aspects.
- Creation of Assessment Cell and resource persons - States (Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Odisha) successfully influenced to establish Assessment cells
- Capacity building workshops - Supported state government in conducting capacity building workshops on School Based Assessments (SBA), Holistic Progress cards (HPC) impacting 3.11 lakh teachers in Rajasthan and 1.7 lakh in Odisha
- Large Scale Assessments - Supported Odisha in conducting Large Scale Assessments, assessed 1.16L+ students’ learning levels, identify learning gaps, needs to better target state education strategies
- Unlocking INR Budget for assessment reform initiatives - Unlocked 67 Cr budget in Rajasthan through Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS), Project Approval Board (PAB), 1.5 Cr in Odisha, 2.5 Cr in Jharkhand
- Resource Person (RP) selection and capacity building - Assisted in creating and executing selection process for assessments cadre. State and District level Resource Persons’ capacity building done - 81 in Rajasthan, 120 in Jharkhand, and 65 in Odisha
- Establishing Digital Infrastructure for Assessments - The Rajasthan State Assessment Cell has developed an assessment portal containing a repository of 10,000+ learning outcome-based test items and various other resources that can be accessed by teachers across Rajasthan benefitting 60 lakh students
- Amulya - Amulya like skills assessment provides a snapshot on life skills health of students and system preparedness among teachers and system officials to ensure effective delivery of life skills education. Completed across four states-Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Jharkhand reaching a total of 3,04,000 children
Impact Created
- Impacted 1.15Cr children, 11.2 L+ teachers, and 31K Middle Managers across different states and UTs through strengthening of institutions and capacity building of stakeholders