Next academic year, Karnataka schools to focus on learning recovery

Next academic year, the schools, affiliated with the state board, will focus on the ‘lost academics’ due to the Covid-19.

The pandemic had forced the longest closure of schools in the last two years.

The Department of Primary and Secondary Education has decided to focus on recovering the learning loss of children studying in grades 1 to 9.

The department officials said this will mainly include foundation-level literacy and numeracy which was lost in the last two years due to lack of physical schooling.

For this purpose, the Department of State Education Research and Training, in association with Azim Premji Foundation, is preparing a resource material that will reach the schools by May 15.

“It is important to improve the core competencies among children and the way we teach kids next academic year will mainly focus on that,” an official said.

As explained, 60% of the focus will be on the present year syllabus and the rest 40% on that of the past two years.

“We are designing a learning recovery teaching material for the whole year which will be implemented at all schools from day one of the commencement of classes for the next academic year,” the officials mentioned.

The teachers, however, will be trained on new resource material concentrating on learning recovery and an activity book will be provided to them.

“For every class, we are preparing a foundation-level Literacy and Numeracy handbook/activity book. The teachers will teach lessons in this book in the classroom,” they said.

Though there are several studies on learning loss during Covid 19 pandemic, the Department of Primary and Secondary Education has also conducted a study to understand the level of learning loss among children.

According to the study report, the children in classes 1 to 5 have shown serious learning loss issues.

The study is still going on for higher grades and the report is available for grades 1 to 5. Out of 5,79,194 children in grades 4 and 5, only 25% can read a story and 26% read words and 22% read paragraphs.

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