Giving Compass' Take:

• Nilesh Nimkar explains how standardized testing in the Indian context fails to adequately describe learning and further disadvantages marginalized children. 

• How can funders work to ensure that children in India get the chance to display their learning and understanding? 

• Learn why real change in rural education in India will come from community engagement. 

The brick kilns of Sonale were bustling with activity—children running around, indigenous technology being used, and lots of mathematics being done. I recently went there after a teacher from the nearby primary school approached our nonprofit, Quest, because the children living there were simply not learning. The concern was, if they didn’t even know their multiplication tables, how would they cope in classes V, VI, and VII?

So I went to see for myself. I asked these children, “To make the mortar for the bricks, how many pits have been dug?

“On one side 11; another side 12”

They also told me they would put three containers of raw material in each pit. So I asked them how many containers they would need in total, and after running off to count them, they came back with the right answers. They could also explain how they arrived at those numbers. What I found was that they were counting in threes. Not the way one recites the tables in the schools, but visualizing it in their mind.

Clearly, these children knew how to multiply. That they failed to memorize their tables was beside the point. They had understood the concept and had demonstrated a strong meta-cognitive ability when they explained how they arrived at the answer. In my further conversations, I was amazed to see the kinds of calculations the children at the brick kilns did. For instance, 13 multiplied by 11 was done mentally because they were able to understand it within their own context (that of the brick kiln).

This example illustrates one of the biggest challenges of our schools today—standardized assessment—which further disadvantages marginalized children. These children have a different type of cultural capital that schools and tests hardly recognize.

Western research in the field of math pedagogy points to the importance of children’s indigenous knowledge and strategies in solving problems and considers them to be the starting point for sound understanding of elementary mathematics. But what are those indigenous strategies in the Indian context? We still don’t know much about them. And our lack of knowledge results in us asking these children to run an unfair race.

Read the full article about the shortcomings of standardized testing in the Indian context by Nilesh Nimkar at India Development Review.