Explained: How NAS survey assesses what school students have learnt; what it has found | Explained News,The Indian Express
The NAS is a periodic exercise carried out broadly in alternate years to monitor the health of the country's school education system.
A nationwide survey carried out by the Union Ministry of Education has found that between 2017 and 2021, the literacy and numeracy skills of school students in India worsened considerably across subjects and grades.
The outcomes of the National Achievement Survey (NAS), the latest edition of which was carried out in the shadow of the prolonged closure of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic, are supposed to guide interventions by authorities across the country to bridge the learning gaps among students enrolled in Classes 3, 5, 8 and 10.
The NAS is a periodic exercise carried out broadly in alternate years to monitor the health of the country’s school education system. It has been designed by the Ministry of Education along with the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to provide a snapshot of learning outcomes in key subjects — essentially “what students know and can do” — at the the end of Classes 3, 5, 8 and 10. These classes are generally seen to mark important stages in the development of a child’s cognitive abilities.
The first edition of NAS was carried out in 2001. In the beginning, the survey was supposed to be an independent project of the NCERT, but it was soon brought under the ambit of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the government’s flagship programme to achieve universalisation of elementary education (UEE), which has now been subsumed into the overarching Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan.
Over the years, the structure of the survey has undergone changes. Between 2001 and 2015, each cycle of the survey covered students of just one grade — so, students of Class 3 were covered in 2003, 2007, 2012, and 2015; students of Class 5 were surveyed in 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2014; those of Class 8 were surveyed in 2002, 2007, 2010, and 2015; and students of Class 10 were covered in 2015 and 2018.
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