Comprehension holds the key to learning. But it is not exactly the strong point of teaching at most schools in India. Most kids learn by rote. Since kids have large megabytes to spare in their impressionable brains, they store a huge diet of knowledge fed to them. To boot, they can even ooze it out at the asking. Most parents therefore satisfy themselves if the children score well in exams as marks are the ultimate benchmark of success. Teachers concerned with finishing their portions hardly ever bother to assess their scholastic skills by applying critical testing methodologies. In the final analysis, the whole educational system gets reduced to testing the capacity to recall rather than comprehension skills.

Knowledge is best imbibed by comprehension than by memorising. But several concepts, terms, theorems and formulae remain incomprehensible to kids. One can remember how difficult it was to reconcile with the fact that human beings live on a planet that is spherical in shape. The queries the fact triggered were numerous. First among them was as to how a spherical body could hold water which covered 70 per cent of its surface area. Second, could it be that the earth is a flat and circular shield just as the moon appears to us from our earth. But then since the earth has to hold water, it must be spherical at the bottom and flat on top with continents floating in the bowl filled with water. Yet, few of us dared raise queries in the classrooms, for fear of being ridiculed by peers. 

Finding their part of the earth’s surface flat and seeing no bulge anywhere, most kids therefore conclude for themselves that they live on a flat earth. Yet for the sake of examination, the earth is spherical. 
Since maps and atlases explain the geography on a flat surface, and few teachers carry a globe to classrooms, the kids are at a loss to understand as to how longitudes converge at poles while latitudes never meet each other.

It is very well to attribute such deficient comprehension to kids studying in government schools catering to poor and disadvantaged sections, given the little exposure to the world and their general lack of resources. But surprisingly, even the so-called top schools have been found to be overly reliant on rote learning and emphasis on creativity and thinking is sadly amiss. A survey by the Ahmedabad based non-profit organisation, Educational Initiatives, in 142 top public schools in the five metros of Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, reveals that they are no different when it comes to rote learning. The survey covered 32,000 students in 4th, 6th and 8th standard classes between February and April 2006. The investigators were supplied with sheets where questions from science, mathematics, English and social science were printed in a slightly different form than what they typically read in their textbooks.

The result does not present a rosy picture of the level of learning even in elite schools. In fact it is altogether depressing. The questions were designed to provoke their capacity to solve problems. What can be inferred from answer sheets is that the students were learning mechanically and were able to answer on the basis of recall or standard procedure. They stumbled or erred when there was some twist in the question. Second, the students did not apply their knowledge to life situations. Third, they may learn something in one context and continue to stick to the same context. Fourth, the students tend to be weak in certain real-life competencies like measurements.

For instance, the students were asked to identify the chemical formula for pure steam by marking the right choice among four options: 1-H20, 2-O2, 3-CO, and 4-it does not have a formula.  65 per cent of the respondents in schools said there was no formula for pure steam while eight and nine per cent marked O2 and CO respectively. Only nine per cent marked the correct answer H2O. Similarly, when asked to guess the length of a pencil and a teaspoon, only about 22 per cent could make an approximately correct guess. 

It is quite natural to memorise mathematical tables, rhymes, poems and anthems at the primary level. But applying the same yardstick to theorems, formulae etc leads to problems. Remember how fractions perplexed us during those 4th standard maths classes? There are simpler methods to grasp them.

I remember my teacher making three pieces of a circular cardboard disc and picking up two of them to make us understand what two-thirds of a roti meant. The fact that fractions are poorly understood is nothing unique even to this day. The respondents (i.e., 8,314 students of 4th and 5th standards) were asked to look at the visual on the right and mark the correct fraction of girls to the overall boy-girl group. Only about 27 per cent students could identify the correct answer. 

When probed as to why most students chose option C, the answer was: ‘My answer is C because there are three boys up and two girls down. And in C there is three on top and two down.’  A clear pattern that could be gleaned from the responses and the interviews is that the figure dominates the thinking of some of the children. They do not seem to have properly understood the concept of fractions. One thing they seem to know well is how to write fractions. And since the figure seems to be dominating, children jump to the conclusion that the correct answer will be a number where 3 is on top and 2 at the bottom.

A better method to enhance comprehension among the kids is to involve them in life-skill applications.  For instance, the students should be asked to measure their rooms, houses, and classrooms, see a plant growing in the earthen bed, estimate the height of buildings by counting floors, actually bargain for things at the market, and do transactions in banks and post offices and reserve a sleeper berth in a train. Few schools and homes envision such activities.

Not more than three per cent of the 500 students could accurately estimate the width of a broad gauge railway track when I posed the query to them while interviewing them for grant of a scholarship.