Academic Director Blog
Dr. SUDHA TURAGA
Academic Director Blog – BENCH MARKING EDUCATION- AN INSIGHT
Academic Director Blog addresses qualitative dimension to the quantitatively focused worldwide study Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations intended to evaluate edifying systems by quantifying 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on science, mathematics, and reading rudimentally besides, other skills. This insight is majorly predicated and inspired by Lucy Crehan’s “Clever Lands’’ a study by visiting prosperous schools across places, diversified cultures, size, and history after PISA. She endeavored to identify the features that prepare students better in comparison to others.
The five principles that she shared for prosperous learning are Design curricula concepts for mastery; Get children yare for formal learning; Treat edifiers as professional; Support children to take on challenges; rather than making concessions, and Amalgamate school accountability with school Support.
Let us examine the above principles in the context of other countries with similar demographics conditions like India but performed better than many a country due to their educational transformations.
Children come to school at different stages of readiness and it is common sense that children from advantaged homes already have a head start in vocabulary compared to children from disadvantaged homes. In India, early childhood care and inculcation gained paramountcy and major strides of intervention to amend the quality of it have commenced. But most of the programs in Early years despite theoretically promulgating the “Play way method” have a structured curriculum and syllabus to be consummated as parents insist on learning.
In Finland, Shanghai, and Singapore at the age of 7years and in Canada and Japan schooling starts at 6yrs. This denotes that children are not required to demonstrate concrete academic outcomes such as reading or integrating. In India, preschools and kindergarten are becoming more academic and edifier-directed and there is no time for free play.
Early years inculcation is prodigiously paramount but focusing heavily on concrete academic skills can have long term negative effects on motivation, emotional health, gregarious demeanor, and self- esteem without perennial positive effect on academic outcomes.
Children who commence formal learning early may sometimes outperform than their peers who are tardy starters in the first few years and later the difference either vanishes or infrequently reverses. Least realizing Indian kindergarteners are subjected to rigorous competitive learning as per the parental pressures additionally.
Korea is being transformed into a multicultural society. Here we consider two examples of Korea’s Inculcative interventions, introduced in replication to contextual demands and societal changes: firstly, the Schools for Amelioration plan; secondly, multicultural inculcation. Korea’s edifying achievements are additionally due to its efficacious inculcation system, Vigorous governmental initiatives that ameliorated the quality and equity of edification. The increasing rate of school enrolment, the reform of school systems, the development of high standards for the national curriculum and textbooks, the improvement of teaching quality, and the utilization of high-stakes exams promote the efficacy of the system.
In most cases, the focus will be on the quality of optically canvassed standards. Reference and guidelines can be used from the National Center in inculcation for benchmarking. PISA study and OECD implements can be utilized for us to set quality standards for sustainability. Time has come to make our schools additionally get benchmarked especially the private schools to maintain their standards and withstand the ecumenical competitors.
Singapore endeavors to optically canvass the system holistically. It invests heavily in inculcation research. All reforms are tested, with the outcomes diligently monitored, afore being rolled out. Close attention is paid to how incipient conceptions and results should be applied in schools. Punctiliously developed textbooks, worksheets and worked examples—practices often visually perceived as archaic in the West are used to inject expertise into the classroom. The result is good alignment between assessments, edifying styles, and accountability.
The second edification is to embrace Singapore’s distinctive approach to edifying, eminently of mathematics as America and England are already doing to some extent. It emphasizes a narrower but deeper curriculum and seeks to ascertain that a whole class progresses through the syllabus. Struggling pupils get compulsory extra sessions to avail them keep up. In an analysis in 2016, the Singaporean approach boosted results.
The third and most consequential edification is to fixate on developing excellent edifiers. In Singapore, the students get trained on keeping up to date with the latest techniques. The govt pays them well, additionally. It accepts the desideratum for larger classes. Preponderant, so the thinking goes, to have sizably voluminous classes edified by excellent edifiers than more diminutive ones edified by mediocre ones.
Finland is reengineering Education system into where in Bachelor education builds high confidence in teachers and principals as high professionals; continuous development with research and practice, teacher as a reflective practitioners, emboldening edifiers and students to endeavor incipient conceptions and approaches, in other words, to put curiosity, imagination, and ingenuity at the heart of learning; and purport of edifying and learning is to pursue ecstasy of learning and cultivating the development of the whole child.
Finland with its relatively circumscribed population and high funding is endeavoring to Co-engender individualized personalized edifying plan employing and getting support to implement with Gregarious care workers, auxiliaries.
As an academic of India, I would prefer the Indian edification system which is multicultural with vigorous roots of ethics and value systems to cater to a convivially diverse population. Indian school and higher inculcation system must endeavor to cultivate deference for the nation and innate resources as a priority. Edifications can be learned in collaborating and understanding the systems of Korea and Singapore that are more proximate to our demographic diversities without losing its fabric of philosophy. India must now co-engender its curriculum and indigenously customize it without any political interference. Priority in the budget withal is an essential aspect of scholastic reforms. The financial funding of any research in inculcation must be found denotes to reach the verification and implementation stages instead of decorative records for another research.
The demographic population is an added advantage that can revolutionize education and reach masses. The teenage idealistic students, social workers, and value-oriented retired healthy mature population can optimally support the outreach of education for equity and diversity
All over the world curriculum framework is getting revised following the current trends of challenges. Inculcation has the faculty to nurture aptitude, inspire passions, increment convivial mobility and provide a framework for the adults of tomorrow to develop into, erudite, ingenious and community-minded citizens.
Bibliography:
Lucy Crehan, Clever Lands, unbound, Great Britain 2016
Hye-Won Lee, Proactive educational reforms in South Korea: Schools for Improvement and multicultural education,
Blog by pasi sahlberg, Global Educational Reform Movement is here!,
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/releaseditems.asp
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/what-other-countries-can-learn-from-singapores-schools
A Blue print for the nation:Lessons from Maryland’s commission on innovation and excellence in education
Dr. SUDHA TURAGA
ACADEMIC DIRECTOR
BENCH MARKING EDUCATION
SUDHA TURAGA
Benchmarking is found in the educational and also other fields. Facile access to the erudition of other countries around the globe and the comparison of ecumenical standards has been verbalized all over the world. Quality and meeting the 21st-century skills in edification is the ordinant dictation of the society for sustainability. Quality has got no universally accepted definition however The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, (2010), defines education as the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a vocation and quality as referring to the character with deference to fineness, or grade of excellence. This paper purports to examine the utilization of scholastic standards and benchmarks in our Indian scholastic context.
The transition in the edification system with the exordium of technology offered in inculcating institutions is a clear denotement that inculcation has to be of a certain quality to meet certain standards in the market. Policymakers, National curriculum framework designers and scholastic bellwethers are finding the comparison of standards across the globe as one of the Edification sector challenges.
According to the study conducted by Canada, standards are defined as ‘indicators of quality that designate prospects for student’. England defined the curriculum accompanying performance standards. After consultation and revision, these incipient curricula and standards were given licit status and implemented in phases.
Without a doubt, the USA, with its decentralized approach to inculcation, has an involute path to negotiate if it is to emerge with high-quality performance 181 standards that meet Inculcative and public criteria for efficacy, credibility, and utility. These examples demonstrate that countries can have divergent views about what the term standard(s) means, even when cognate categorically to student performance.
The purport of our inculcative benchmarking is to raise the standards of inculcation for all, to evaluate or check by comparison with a standard. Over time, best practices emerge predicated on the experience of what actions led to prosperous outcomes. Benchmark acts as the minimum threshold of performance and is a perspicacious discipline to assess one’s own program’s processes.
The project of Benchmarking commenced with a pilot project conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in coordination with the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and Jon Schnur’s team at America Achieve. The study commenced with Benchmarking students’ performance from all over the world by taking a kindred test of same-aged children.
Bench marking enables:
- Exchange of Experiences and conceptions between individual Schools and Edifiers.
- Inculcation ascendant entities to identify and learn from better-performing edification systems.
- Each school to ken where it stands. This is utilizable information for the schools, parents, teachers, and children.
- 4. Standards to be developed of expected performance levels that schools can quantify and amend against.
Scholastic benchmarking is not Americans against Asians, and schools against school; inciting nation to compete against nation; to delineate the impotent from the vigorous but it is all about amending public edification. Benchmarking is not fomenting panics about performance in cognation to overseas competitors. It is not about dividing schools, families, and communities from each other to engender facile pickings for the edifying market.
With the current paradigm shifts made in the CBSE curriculum and the exordium of amending standards with several interventions; time is ripe for private schools to take cognizance of benchmarking.
India after nine years participated in this ecumenical performance assessment and very poorly fared in assessments. With the present trend of competitions, national as well as international and migration of population benchmarking has become a desideratum.
In most cases, the focus will be on the quality of visually examined standards. Reference and guidelines can be used from the International or National center in edification for benchmarking. PISA study and OECD implements can be utilized for us to set the standards for sustainability. Time has come to make our schools withal get benchmarked especially the private schools to maintain their standards and withstand the ecumenical competitors.
References:
The Use of Educational Standards and Benchmarks in Indicator Publications Sally Thomas and Wen-Jung Peng (Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
BPIR.Com, Bench marking schools, Aug 14 2013
Education for Sustainability: Quality Education Is A Necessity in Modern Day. How Far do the Educational Institutions Facilitate Quality Education? Journal of Education and Practice www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online) Vol.7, No.2, 2016
