Educational research needs special emphasis, says Sridhar Rajagopalan

By Sridhar Rajagopalan

While increased expenditure on education is always desirable, it is even more important that whatever is spent is consumed effectively. For the GDP target of $5 trillion by 2024, India will require a large number of highly skilled workforce. However, from the long-term perspective, there is a need to focus on foundation learning to ensure every child can read well by class 2 and do all arithmetic operations by class 5. Furthermore, regular scientifically developed assessments both in Foundational Learning and for the higher classes, are critical to ensure students are learning well. India’s performance in international benchmarking tests like PISA (scheduled for 2021) is dependent on this.

On the technology front, a lot is being done to solve education-employability issue, however, for growth in real sense, the focus should be on software including personalised adaptive learning systems that have been proven to be effective than just hardware. Finally, educational research - at all levels - is needed to develop these capabilities. These are the areas that need special emphasis and increased allotments in the budget if we are to ensure higher quality learning outcomes in our schools.

(The writer is the Co-Founder & Chief Learning Officer of Educational Initiatives)