About
Asha Assessments
At Asha Chennai we are now supporting more than 200 government schools spread across Tamilnadu through our SPRINT program.
With this kind of scale we felt the need to develop metrics to tell us how our projects are doing and start measuring the impact we are having and fine-tune our actions so as to improve the outcome. However, assessments at the government schools in Tamilnadu and broadly India are completely broken and the data coming from that is totally unreliable. Therefore we started conducting our own assessments starting from 2014-15. These are intended to measure the basic literacy and numeracy levels of the students.
We conduct our assessments for three reasons.
#1
The teachers should know the level of each child, first to understand areas where the conceptual understanding is lacking for the whole class and where there are specific students who need additional help. In higher classes the children should also know where they stand in relation to the knowledge expectation at their grade level, so they can focus on their own weak areas and improve themselves.
#2
Assessments provide an opportunity for the organisation (in this case Asha Chennai) to communicate to the teachers what is the expectation in terms of learning outcome.
#3
As an organisation, Asha needs to understand the landscape in which we operate so that the programs can be designed for meet the needs of the students and at a level that will be suitable for the students. We also need to understand the effectiveness of our programs in improving the learning outcomes of the children.
As a general principle, an assessment needs to be aligned to the curriculum or learning objectives and not to the content or approach of the textbook. Our assessment, while it is simple, is aligned to the learning objectives and not repeat what is there in the textbook. There will always be some questions in the written assessment which presents the topic in a manner they are not used to but which they should know based on the LOs. Also the assessment should ideally be orthogonal to what is taught in the class so that it also measures the transference of knowledge. The oral assessment being a simple toolkit that was designed commonly for all of India, to some extent serves that purpose as well.
Besides these assessments in literacy and numeracy, we also have assessments aligned to our Computer Science curriculum in the various programs. These are described lower down in this page.
How do we conduct it?
As Asha, we conduct oral assessments aligned to Pratham’s ASER in Oct/Nov of every year. This provides a basic tool to measure the learning attainment level of every school / child. It provides a score that can be compared across schools/regions and also importantly across time to measure the progress of a school over the years. We also conduct a written assessment in March to give us a more detailed picture of the gaps in learning.
Here are the written assessment papers for the years 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20.
While we make our assessments stress-free for the child, they are conducted “strictly”. Papers are kept secret till the date of the test. Teachers from other schools come and conduct the test. We train the teachers so that they are conducted in the same manner at all schools. Thanks to these efforts we can see that our data is “well-behaved”.
Asha Chennai has been collecting data about the schools and children over these years. We have been analysing the assessment performance data along with a lot of data about the schools from the UDISE database as well as sociological data about the children we ourselves have been collecting. In the future we also intend to correlate this data with the usage data coming from Asha Kanini. Here are some of the sociological data we have been gathering the last few years,
- Education status of the parents.
- Student’s pre-school education.
- Attendance level of the student.
- Date of birth, Height and Weight.
- Information from the school teachers about whether the student does homework regularly (if the school gives it).
- Details about the school like strength, no of teachers, percentage of SC and ST students, percentage of children from BPL families etc.
Data Analytics
At the basic level we provide a report to each school to show them the performance of children in their school. It also provides some analysis on gaps in learning levels of the children.
Each year we undertake a more detailed analysis to get us a clearer idea of how our schools and broadly our program is doing. Here are a couple of sample reports.
- Based on the data over the years we did a study of the sociological factors affecting education. We have learnt several things like how parents education has an outsized impact on the performance of the children, teacher-student ratio does not impact as much, children's and schools’ performance in different subjects is well correlated, children’s and school’s relative performance over the years remain very static etc. See the detailed report from 2024-25 and a blog article that discusses the Factors that affect education based on the results from the assessment.
- These assessments have also provided a good way to evaluate our own programs. Here are some findings like how our KaradiPath program is improving English performance, our mini-schools helped arrest the slide in education, children from UP-Rajatalab are doing better than children in TN in their mother tongue etc.
- Asha has been involved in deeper studies with the IIT Bombay Education and Technology dept. Three interns worked on this project and a paper was submitted to the IEEE T4E conference 2019. Here is the paper. We have done a detailed study of the continuity in educational performance on the influence of parental education on it for the T4E conference in 2027.
Contact us if you are interested in working with us on data analysis of assessment data and further improve the same.
Computer Science Assessments
In our courses we follow a “Learn by Doing” pedagogical approach. Each lesson is made of exercises that the students are expected to complete. This provides a basic Formative Assessment right there for the teacher. At the end of the course we have an assessment as a part of all our programs.
The assessment is designed by a lead teacher and a teacher from a different school or centre comes and conducts the assessment for the students. The assessment is partly done with a pen and paper and partly on a computer with the practical part having a higher weightage. The teachers typically evaluate it right there and record the marks while also keeping the paper and the artifacts for random checks.
We use these as well as attendance and project work to determine which students have completed the course.
Here are some sample assessments.
