‘It took me quite some time to get the
little girl to let me know what was bothering her,’ said Prof. A. K. Sharma,
the former Director of NCERT. The year was 2000 and he was telling me about an
incident from a class 2 maths period in the model school in the NCERT campus. The
teacher had just completed teaching children subtraction of two-digit numbers
with ‘borrowing’, and he had found two children hesitating over the problems
they had been given to solve.
The first, a girl, had made a ‘mistake’ as
she had failed to borrow from the tens side. Being a grandfatherly and kindly
figure, he was able to cajole the girl to speak up. Very softly, looking down
and away from him all the while, she said, ‘We learnt in the moral science
class that borrowing is bad.’
Reeling from this, he approached the other
child, a boy, and discussed why he had not completed his work on the problem. After
much exchange, the boy said, ‘But why should I borrow 1? I want to borrow 2.’
Taking part in a recent session on ‘error
analysis’, I was reminded of Prof. Sharma’s advice to engage with children to
understand their ‘errors’ rather than rely on their work on paper. In numerous
assessment experiences since, I’ve seen children who are otherwise very
competent falter because of an issue at home or a fight with a friend or
because they are being bullied. In open-ended questions in language, teachers
are hard put to identify if there really is an ‘error’ or if the child’s view
is a valid, logical interpretation. (And asking only close-ended questions is
hardly sufficient to understand children’s abilities.) It becomes even more
difficult when it comes to children from marginalized backgrounds – as they
encounter discrimination and even denigration (of their background, language or
culture), they often resist by ‘not-learning’ or do not answer out of fear of
being ‘disciplined’.
As the evaluation industry expands in the
Indian context with more and more professionals taking in rigorous analysis of children’s
responses and analyses of their ‘errors’, the tendency is to interpret these
within the framework of the subject for which the test was conducted. But do we
know what we really assess when we look closely at children’s responses? What
if it’s not a maths or language issue but something else altogether?
