competencies that require more practice in their block.
An initiative like Saksham Ghoshna has helped energise the government school education system in Haryana with government stakeholders assuming greater responsibility towards their work. In classrooms, it has incentivised competency-based teaching and learning. By providing detailed reports of student learning levels across the state, it enables targeted interventions. Finally, the “third party” element of this exercise provides external validation to the potential effectiveness of ongoing academic interventions such as remedial classes, training and mentoring support to teachers and a revamped review and monitoring framework.
In the short to medium term, high quality competency-based assessments such as Saksham Ghoshna are critical in assessing student learning levels. However, the state-conducted SAT assessments should ideally be able to serve most of the same objectives as Saksham Ghoshna. However, for this to happen, additional sets of reforms would need to be undertaken at the state level to further strengthen the SAT framework. Senior Government officials in the School Education Department appreciate the need for such reforms and are working towards this. These interventions could be particularly timely, as the state looks to improve its performance in the NAS exam, now likely to be held in 2021.