CHENNAI: The impact of pandemic on school education has been immense, shows data released by the Annual Status of Education Report released Wednesday.
As per its findings, at least a quarter of students in Tamil Nadu did no learning activity during an entire week of the survey period. This, despite most students having received their textbooks and learning materials.
The report shows that almost 94 per cent government school students in the State have received their learning materials for the current grade, compared to two-thirds of their private peers. Not just that, more than half of the students surveyed had done no or just one learning activity during that survey week.
The report defines a learning activity as reading textbooks, solving worksheets, and learning from audio or video materials. Only about 20-25 per cent of students did more than three learning activities in that week.
Further, the survey showed that despite the lockdown, reading the textbook is the most popular learning activity among students in the State.
Around 55 per cent of students, who did at least one learning activity during the week of the survey, read the textbook while about 24 per cent solved worksheets.
However, among students from government schools, watching television for learning was almost as popular as reading as over 47 per cent of students did it.
However, only 14.6 per cent of students from government schools watched video or recorded classes and 5.3 per cent attended live online classes.
The survey showed that 60 per cent of schools did not send any learning material during the week of the survey. Among those who did, WhatsApp was the medium that was most commonly used by schools.
Almost 94 per cent of all weekly learning material was sent via WhatsApp to students in private schools and three-fourth of the content to students in government schools.
About 13 and 14 per cent of the government school students received that week’s learning material through phone call and personal visits respectively.
The survey showed that only 41 per cent of the parents of children surveyed were visited or called by teachers and less than a third had contacted the teacher during the week of the survey.
According to this report, 83.5 per cent of parents who had high levels of education supported their children’s learning while only 37.3 with low levels of education did it.