Gender bias still prevalent in ‘top’ schools in five metros: Study

Chennai:

Gender bias is still prevalent among students in top schools across five metros and the students’ performance in math, science and social studies is way below par with the international average, according to a national study.

Releasing the findings of the Quality Education Study, done by Wipro and Educational Initiatives in 89 schools in five metros, including 21 in Chennai, vice-president of Large Scale Assessments Educational Initiatives Vyjayanthi Sankar said here on Saturday that students in ‘top’ schools of India performed lower than the average on questions used from studies such as ‘Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in Reading Literacy Study at Class IV level.

She said there was improvement in Class VIII level but then it was more related to answering procedural questions that do not involve deeper understanding or application of concepts.

“The study found out that students in ‘top’ schools are not learning with understanding and harbour a number of misconceptions that do not get corrected as students move up to higher classes,” said Vyjayanthi.

“Rote learning is often deceptive and passes off as apparent learning but does not let students develop the higher order thinking skills such as critical thinking, creativity and application,” she said.

The year-long study which involved 23,000 students, 790 teachers, 54 principals, also found that there is deep rooted bias against the girl child even in students from families which probably belong to the educated and higher socio-economic strata of the society.

Interestingly, the study also brought to light that boys perform better than girls in math and science at class VIII level.

The findings also reveal that schools from Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) performed among the top two and the difference with other boards were statistically significant.

The study recommended large-scale campaign among schools on notions of quality, wide ranging debate on alternative models that question widely held beliefs on learning environments and emphasizes learning in co-scholastic areas, periodic benchmarking of all aspects of educational quality besides providing effective teacher support.