Rote vs meaningful learning

India is going to join the league of 90 countries in the eighth cycle of Programme for International Students’ Assessment (PISA) in 2022. PISA aims at measuring 15-year-olds’ knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science. The OECD-steered PISA has acquired the reputation for benchmarking the educational health of countries, both developed and developing. Despite widespread criticisms about imposing western standards, unrepresentative samples of students at the national level, and its professed assessment of abilities required for modern economies, there is no other testing programme that influences policymakers and the public alike when the findings are made public every three years.

Sample questions, for instance, on discounts and design of T-shirts are not necessarily familiar to all sections of a country’s population. A country like China is represented by four out of a total of 32 provinces in the last cycle of testing, giving a distorted picture of Chinese students’ performance. Though India will also be represented by the Union Territory of Chandigarh, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Kendriya Vidyalayas in 2022, the latter two have at least an all-India character, with students drawn from all over the country.

The PISA tests are competency-based, unlike textbook-centric and content-based academic tests and examinations conducted in schools and by education boards. The New Education Policy (NEP) also recommends competency-based assessment to test higher-order skills such as analysis, critical thinking and conceptual clarity. These, along with problem-solving, collaboration and communication abilities comprise 21st century skills, which are spoken about extensively as requirements for global citizenship.

Communication is not only the proficiency in language, but also its appropriate and effective usage. The latter has more to do with the culture, context and requirement. Competencies are considered as a combination of knowledge, skills and abilities. While knowledge is emphasised in school education, with a sizeable amount of time apportioned to developing cognitive capacities, students have fewer opportunities to engage with skill development. Skills require extensive provisioning of physical infrastructure, sufficient time for students to gain hands-on experience, and professional development of teachers to continuously hone their abilities to transact.

Students’ abilities can be raised when they are enthused with opportunities of interactive and reflective classrooms. It requires not only change in the assessment practices but also the way the curriculum is transacted.

Although subject-specific delivery of content, session after session, demarcated for different subjects, enables students to acquire information and understanding, it also deprives them of the scope for reflection and building inter-relationships among subjects. Teachers’ concern for covering the syllabus, students’ interest in marks, and parents’ anxiety for their wards to complete written homework, assignments, etc., makes learning a stale exercise. Learning assumes the shape of a highly patterned and monotonous activity, in the absence of a scope for its enrichment through mutual interaction between teachers and students and between students themselves.

The NEP also recommends creation of space for a more holistic, inquiry-based, discovery-based, discussion-based and analysis-based learning. The grievance of enormous content to be delivered is also taken care of, with a plan to reduce the curriculum load, to facilitate interaction.

This is inevitable in the context of the changing requirements of society. While early 20th century learning centered around meeting the challenges of manufacturing, which required standardisation and uniformity, 21st century learning goes beyond that to provide solutions to global scientific and technological challenges. While technological innovations in different fields emanate from some countries, others are used as sites of mass production. It calls for not only a rethink on curriculum development, transaction and assessment in higher education, but also in school education.

Critical thinking, which is nothing but an objective analysis and evaluation of an issue, can be promoted across all stages of schooling with requisite competencies to be attained at each level. An illustration of how Grade-4 children’s learning in a government-run elementary school in New Brunswick in the state of New Jersey, US, shows how students can be given open-ended and diverse learning opportunities. The teacher in the class was involved in his own reading, while each of a pair of students were deeply engrossed in finding answers to the questionnaire that was supplied to them. They all had voluminous reference books before them and had to fill in answers to questions such as the name of the author, publisher, number of pages, year and place of publication, etc., by browsing through the book.

Every pair of students had a different reference book, and the questions required time to find answers. The students were not in a hurry but were passionately involved in the assigned work. It was an opportunity for them to undertake and monitor their own learning, without the interference of a teacher. The moment they filled the answers in, they knew that they were able to complete the assigned task. It was not necessary that they found answers to all questions.

More importantly, it enabled students to be independent learners, reflect on the assigned task, with enough time to find solutions based on their abilities, and comprised discussions among pairs of students to learn from each other. Certainly, the teacher had briefed the students before assigning the task, and after its completion there was a deliberation on how and what they learned. In this entire exercise, there was no stress on either the teacher or the student to complete the task in a specified time or cram in facts and figures. The information was already available, and the students only had to discover it. It is not only problem-solving but also critical thinking at that stage, for there would be no clear indication for instance of ‘name of the author’ in the reference book.

It is often wondered why even at tertiary level some students fail to distinguish between a printer and publisher, and how to reference books. PISA is an opportunity and NEP the means to reverse the adversities in learning, but only if we do not fall into another trap -- of patterning the learning for PISA.

(The writer is Professor & Principal, Regional Institute of Education, Mysuru)