11% of Class 3 kids lack basic maths skills: NCERT study

NEW DELHI: More than a quarter of class III students in Tamil Nadu and Jammu & Kashmir lack foundational numeracy skills. Overall, compared to the global benchmark proficiency level, 11% of Indian kids in Class III lack basic mathematics skills with states like Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Goa and Gujarat among the 12 performing worse than the national average.
Another 37% of kids are in the category of learners with “limited knowledge and skills and they can partially complete basic grade-level tasks.” On the other end of the spectrum are the children from states like West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh and Bihar who have either sufficient knowledge and skill or even have developed superior knowledge and skill and can complete complex grade level tasks.
This was revealed in the national report on ‘benchmarking for oral reading fluency with reading comprehension and numeracy 2022’ of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which also highlighted that in eight languages more than a quarter of the children of Class III assessed for oral reading frequency performed below global minimum proficiency. 42% of the children studying in Tamil lack basic reading skills with on an average a boy being able to read 16 words per minute correctly while for girls it is 18. Children reading in Khasi, Bengali, Mizo, Punjabi, Hindi and English demonstrated the highest level of oral reading proficiency.
The ministry of education launched the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat in July 2021 as a national mission to enable all children at the end of Class III to attain foundational skills by the year 2026-2027. As a step towards strengthening efforts for foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN), a large-scale foundational learning study (FLS) has been undertaken jointly by the ministry and NCERT in March 2022.
In the foundational numeracy study, a majority (52%) of the students fall in the scoring range of 70 and above, 40% of the total population are in the “70-83 score points” which signifies that these children “have developed sufficient knowledge and skill and they can successfully complete the most basic grade-level tasks. 10% of the kids fall in the top category of 84 and above, which means they with their superior knowledge and skill “can complete complex grade level tasks.”
However, there are a lot of gaps within the states/ UTs. Apart from the 11% which are below the global benchmark, there are 37% students who partially fulfil the global benchmark in foundational numeracy. But there are states/ UTs like Andaman and Nicobar (57%), Nagaland (56%), Goa (50%), Sikkim (49%), Arunachal Pradesh (49%), Tamil Nadu (48%), Ladakh (48%) and Madhya Pradesh (46%) among others where a significant population of Class III kids “have limited knowledge and skills” and “as a result, they can partially complete basic grade-level tasks.” In all, there are 13 states/ UTs where more than half of the Class III either lack basic level of mathematics or can partially fulfil the grade level competencies.
The study aims to provide reliable data about Class III students to know what they are able to do in foundational literacy and numeracy and the extent of learning outcomes being achieved.