Students from backward classes in Rajasthan are fast catching up with their peers from the general category even though most school kids across social groups in the state needed improvement, according to a recent NCERT survey.
Students from backward classes in Rajasthan are fast catching up with their peers from the general category even though most school kids across social groups in the state needed improvement, according to a recent NCERT survey.
OBC students showed the highest gain, scoring an average of 246 in Hindi while ST and SC kids got 221 and 241, as against 259 by general category students, the National Achievement Survey revealed.
The difference in the average performances of OBCs and the general category kids, in English and Science, was very less, the survey noted. Apart from English, ST students fared significantly poorer as compared to the general category children in other subjects.
As many as 9,508 Class 10 students from 269 schools in Rajasthan participated in the survey, with the response rate being 75%. The survey assessed the learning levels of students in English, Mathematics, Science, Social Science and Modern Indian Language (MIL).
The average performance of students in the state was significantly lower than the national average of 250 in all the subjects, with the highest being in Social Science (248) and the lowest in English (229).
Most students in the state came under the ‘Needs Improvement’ category having scored between 200 and 240.
A key finding of the survey was the little difference between the performances of girls and boys. In fact, the girls scored slightly better than boys in English.
While rural students averaged 240 in Hindi against 255 of urban kids, there was not much difference between the two in other subjects.
The performance of private schools was considerably higher vis-à-vis government schools, with the highest difference emerging in Science (35) and lowest in English (11).
The competency-wise comparison in 19 topics showed Rajasthan students fare better than the national average in History and ‘How Things Work’ under Science, while in Geography, they were as good as their national peers, and in the rest, they fared lower.