National Achievement Survey (NAS), 2021

National Achievement Survey (NAS) is India's biggest, triennial, countrywide, sample-based academic assessment. NAS was introduced to offer an organized assessment of levels of learning at the district, regional, and national levels. Those insights would be utilized in policy development and enhancement of pedagogical strategies to promote learning effectiveness and fairness.

The Department of School Education and Literacy under the Ministry of Education, Government of India, oversees NAS; while CBSE is responsible for conducting it, and NCERT is responsible for designing the assessment framework around it.

Some Misconceptions:

NAS is NOT an education test. It is a framework evaluation done on a pan-India representative sample with the goal of providing feedback about the performance of our country's schooling system.

Specific institution or pupil scores are not provided by NAS. It summarizes performances at the district, state, and national levels, with the district serving as the reporting unit.

How would NAS receive suggestions at the system level?

These would be received by distributing standardized surveys to pupils and gathering data on key variables such as classroom environment, instructional practices, and individual household and family variables.?

• In Grades 3 and 5, there are three major instructional areas of testing: Languages, Maths, and Environmental Studies.
• In Grade 8, there are 4 curricular areas: languages, maths, sciences, and social studies.
• In Grade 10, the focus is on these academic areas: language, maths, science, and social studies.?

What was the scale? NAS covered 733 districts, all states, and Union Territories, about 1,23,729 schools, and 38,87,759 students across India.

What did NAS 2021 find?

1.????Downfall in Literacy: NAS found that between 2017 and 2021, literacy worsened across India.

2.????Effect of pandemic: The research also emphasized kids' perceptions of studying online during the pandemic while campuses were closed, with 78 percent describing it as "burdensome with a lot of assignments".

3.????An overall digital inadequacy:At least 38% of participants stated they had trouble learning at their residence, and 24% stated that they did not have access to digital gadgets.?

4.????Some states outperformed: Where most states scored lower when compared to the nationwide average, a few states, namely Kerala, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Punjab, surpassed the average scores. Notably, Delhi's performance across the eighth and the tenth grades were higher than the national average.

5.????Girls performed better: Girls continued to outperform boys in practically all topics across all grades, both nationwide and at the state level.

6.????Social group-wise performance: Pupils from the scheduled caste (SC), scheduled tribe (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) groups performed worse than learners from the general group.

Why is it needed??

NAS should enable state/UT administrations in establishing long-term, mid-term, and short-term initiatives to increase education levels and focus on differential development, depending on NAS 2021 statistics.

The results of NAS 2021 will aid in the diagnosis of holistic knowledge and the effects that lengthy school closures have had on children' education from the perspective of their socio-emotional and intellectual and cognitive growth.

And the conclusions of NAS will aid in infrastructure-building and capacity enhancement of teachers and education administrators.

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