world-wide study on 'Learning Poverty Level' (LPL) after two-years of COVID pandemic period has shown that currently around 70 percent of children are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text by age 10 years. Thus, there is an urgent need to get back to foundational literacy skills with reading and small school strategies to redeem alarming loss of learning levels during COVID times, I feel.
Most well-meaning educators now strongly feel that despite all the technological advancements and all kinds of universalization of elementary projects with corporate and international funding have not been able to make a dent on learning levels of children. In rural areas, the grade five students have relapsed to illiteracy in two years time. Social psychologists say that the cognitive development gap has of mild category has developed in city areas, moderate in towns, severe in rural areas and profound in unreachable marginalized groups.
Many parents in cities and towns are complaining that due to poor on-line learning and mobile addiction, children's cognitive development has suffered a setback and their children have become dull minded. Thus, loss of learning levels or enhancement of learning poverty at the elementary school level has been tremendous in the years from 2020 to 2022.
The governments in various countries are thinking of implementation bridge courses, compensatory education packages, deschooling methodologies, accelerated learning materials, community schooling and home schooling strategies to recover the loss of learning levels. Unless the NGOS and CBOs are encouraged to reach out to children with learning gaps in a big way, there is no way out. The government sector projects and schemes have failed due to poor implementation and bungling and they will continue to do so, it is felt.
It is being asserted that the foundational literacy skills are important, but we extra emphasis on reading because it stands proved that reading is main measure of learning assessment. Most cognitive psychologists believe that reading is the pathway to learning any subject area and for further learning. It also implies that every lesson session must have mandatory reading time in schools.
It is suggested that for children with severe learning loss, in small schools, capacity should be built to assess individual learning needs and develop individualized learning programme for each child with the intensive support interventions to recover what each child has lost in last two years. It is also needed to be ensured that teachers have the training and acquire skills to create individualized child-centric learning resources.
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