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According to sources, three global educational non-profits — Educational Testing Services (ETS), American Institutes for Research (AIR), and the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) — have expressed interest in assisting in the establishment of India’s first national school-level examination and assessment regulator.
While ETS is well-known for administering the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and GRE (Graduate Record Examination), which are used to gain admission to top universities around the world, AIR and ACER are well-known for conducting research on behavioral and social science domains, as well as learning assessment studies.
Responding to an Expression of Interest (EoI) for selecting consulting services to set up the proposed regulator PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), the organizations approached the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which is envisioned as an instrument for “establishing comparative measures and equivalence” among school examination boards and promoting collaboration among them.
This means that PARAKH will be expected to address the issue of disparities in student scores across boards. It will also “review all aspects of the design and conduct of the NAS 2017/2018 and 2021 exercises and identify areas for improvement” in addition to conducting future rounds of National Achievement Surveys (NAS) and other surveys on learning outcomes.
PARAKH will serve as a standard-setting body for student assessment and evaluation for all school boards in the country, according to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
According to sources, ETS, ACER, and AIR are among the few organizations that responded to the August Expression of Interest (EOI). On October 19, the NCERT issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the project based on the responses.
ACER, headquartered in Australia, has an Indian subsidiary. It is best known for administering a series of benchmark tests for learning assessment in English, Mathematics, and Science to students in grades III-X.
AIR rose to prominence in the 1960s after conducting the largest study of its time among high school students in the United States on racial disparities and economic mobility, among other things.
The chosen agency will assist the PARAKH team in “incorporating international evidence to strengthen assessment systems in India to meet Covid-19 and other pandemic situations,” among other things.
PARAKH will manage India’s participation in international assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in addition to NAS and FLN (PIRLS).
PARAKH will be a constituent body of the council, whereas the NCERT is an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Education. According to the RFP, the consulting firm will be selected on a three-year contract that will be renewed each year based on its performance.
According to the NCERT’s key deliverable areas for the proposed body, it will develop and validate assessment standards for all school stages and curricular areas of school education based on NEP 2020.
“(It will) provide technical guidelines and inputs for boards to design, develop, and implement state-wide systems for measuring student learning aligned with state and national curricular standards… Support examination boards regarding new assessment patterns (both for internal and external assessment), evaluation process, and practices, result in calculation and compilation, post-result practices, and the latest research,” adds the RFP.
Source:IE
