The Ministry of Education (MoE) is conducting a ‘Foundational Learning Study’ to understand the learning levels of students at the end of Grade 3 of the foundational learning stage.
The Foundational Learning Study will be conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in all states and Union Territories (UTs) in four days, starting from March 23, at the sampled schools. Approximately, 10,000 schools and 1 lakh students are reported to be participating in this study.
The study aims to establish reading proficiency benchmarks for fluency with comprehension for 22 Indian languages and to establish a baseline for the ‘National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy’ (NIPUN- Bharat).
MoE has launched the NIPUN-Bharat mission to provide a roadmap for strengthening the domain of foundational learning at the national level.
The National Education Policy 2020 highlights that “the ability to read and write, and perform basic operations with numbers, is a necessary foundation and an indispensable prerequisite for all future schooling and lifelong learning”.
The dimensions of learning can be manifold, but the basic ability to read with comprehension, writing and an understanding of the basic numeracy concepts relate to core learning goals at the foundational stage.
It will assess the ability to read age-appropriate known and unknown text at a certain pace accurately, with comprehension, and also the foundational numeracy skills and form a baseline for the NIPUN Bharat Goals.