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If one googles ”Learning levels of children with disability” or “Proportion of children with disability who can read basic text”; to try and explore the outcomes in education of such children, it will be hard to find relevant data.
It has now been widely acknowledged that a large proportion of children are not acquiring foundational skills. The World Bank emphasises that this learning crisis undermines sustainable growth and poverty reduction. To draw attention to this crisis, it has introduced the concept of Learning Poverty[2] which is the percentage of children unable to read by the age of 10, an issue that is at the heart of global poverty.
In addition to this, the UNESCO report[1] on inclusion in education provides an analysis of key factors that cause the exclusion of learners in education systems worldwide. These factors include background, identity and ability (i.e., gender, age, location, poverty, disability, ethnicity, indigeneity, language, religion, migration or displacement status, sexual orientation or gender identity expression, incarceration, beliefs and attitudes). Exploring this reality, UIS and World Bank estimate that 53% of children from low and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In poor countries, this percentage is as high as 80%.
In India, 61% of children with disabilities aged 5-19 years are attending educational institutions while 27% have never attended any. Nearly 600,000 (28%) children with disabilities between ages 6 and 13 years are out of school. Their learning levels and learning gaps remain unknown and currently there are no assessments that show their progress.
Quality inclusive education is at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 4 makes a promise to ensure inclusive equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Pratham, ASER Centre and CBM[2], India, have initiated an effort to focus attention on learners with disabilities in the discourse of learning poverty. Assessment for All[3] (AfA) toolkit is an outcome of an action research project to develop a toolkit that can accommodate learners with disabilities who are often left behind in the education system. The toolkit intends to assess the foundational skills of all children with a special focus on learners with disabilities between the age group of 5 to 16 years who have received a minimum of two years of educational intervention. It is designed to assess skills that are pertinent to the stage where learners begin to learn to read and develop numeracy skills.
AfA is an open-source foundational learning assessment tool that has built-in accommodations to include all learners (with and without disabilities). It is derived from the much-used ASER (citizen-led assessment) framework. It is designed to be used in large scale assessments, classroom assessments and even at home by parents. The tool is an attempt to acknowledge the diversity among learners and make inclusivity intrinsic to the assessment approach. At its core is the problem statement that “The ‘left out’ are visible, but the ‘left behind’ are invisible”. The AfA aims to help all stakeholders within the education system (policymakers, administrators, teachers, parents and students) highlight the problem of ‘visible schooling but non-visible learning’. The fundamental aim is to report the foundational learning levels of ALL children through this tool.
What does AfA measure? (Making abilities visible)
The tool constitutes 26 sub-tasks that assess foundational language and literacy, numeracy and problem-solving. These tasks together produce a snapshot of a learners’ performance in the competencies that are crucial in the initial years of learning, when the foundation of literacy and mathematics learning pathways are built.
A democratic approach was for the development of this tool where all stakeholders were invited, right from parents, experts to practitioners who were to be involved in the design and validation of the toolkit. Through these consultations and many rounds of field pilot studies, specific attention was paid to making the tool usable for all learners and for making valid inferences about their abilities.
How does it include ALL learners?
The AfA tool attempts to accommodate learners with and without disabilities. The central idea is to remove the barriers for all learners and include them in any assessment or educational program. The tasks have been adapted in a manner that preserves their integrity while providing opportunities for learners to showcase their abilities. The adaptations have been made proactively, following the Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The tool is designed with inbuilt adaptations within each task so that it is appropriate for all learners, including those with cognitive disabilities. Specific adaptations have been prescribed for learners with visual and hearing impairment.
AfA as an artefact embodies responsibilities, values and ethics of inclusion. For a teacher, the journey can start by identifying the problem of low learning by using in-built accommodations and then aligning it to the learners’ needs and later by selecting the most effective pedagogical process. It can generate data to build comprehensive and nuanced pictures of the educational experiences and quality of achievements of all learners. This toolkit aims to break the rigid boundaries between learners with and without disabilities, socio-cultural, economic differences and foster coalition through affinity among students and service providers(teachers).
The result of assessments using the AfA tool gives appropriate and adequate information about the present level of ability of a child. The information thus retrieved has the potential to provide targeted interventions that facilitate additional support in the acquisition of foundational language and mathematical concepts.
A use case for a promising future
The Government MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) Schools, M ward of Mumbai, India assessed all learners between the grades 3 to 5 (approx. 3,700 learners), including learners with disabilities using the AfA tool in early 2020. This culminated in a guided approach to meet the needs of various learners and the formulation of effective intervention by the state education system.
In the present COVID-19 situation, all resource teachers of the Assam state Government, India, were trained after which they facilitated the assessment using the AfA tool during the lockdown phase of the pandemic. The results brought to light critical areas in which learners required support. Civil Society Organisations (CSO) within the network of CBM in India (approx. 50), were trained and carried out assessments for their projects during the lockdown to assess key areas in which learners were lagging.
Just like instruction, for any assessment to be valid and fair. It is essential to understand that one size does not fit all. It is therefore necessary to have some scope for adapting the assessments to meet the needs of all learners in order to make true and reliable judgments about their abilities. As learners with disabilities have long been ignored in the assessment systems, the AfA tool intends to fill this void. It also aims to address the challenges faced while assessing learners with disabilities and initiate the process of real-time data availability to enrich strategies for foundational literacy and numeracy.
The AfA aims to reach out to many learners and influence inclusion, generate evidence and measure the progress of learners with disabilities. This initiative not only supports the participation of learners with disabilities in large scale assessments but also fulfils the mandate of international and national commitments of inclusion.
Visit: http://assessmentforall.org
[1] https://en.unesco.org/gem-report/report/2020/inclusion
[2] https://www.cbm.org
[3] http://assessmentforall.org/
