Construction and standardization of toolkit of numeracy skills

ABSTRACT

India is facing learning crisis as close to 5 crore children in elementary school, lacks numeracy and literacy skills mentioned in draft NEP, 2019.ASER (2021) reported that COVID 2019 has worsen the situation, as only 10 per cent of the kids studying grade III to V in government schools can solve a subtraction problem. National Curriculum Frameworks, time to time has expressed the need to bring changes in the areas of teaching, learning and assessment for qualitative improvement in the school education system in India.If we want to bridge the learning gap, we need to provide the suitable interventions. For that purpose, we need to know where students are on the skill continuum and specifically the learning areas which need attention. Traditional pen paper test or examination is designed to test their knowledge on the bases of content, not on competence. This paper endeavors to construct standardized a simple, cost effective and easy to administer screening assessment toolkit to check the competence based numeracy skills for grade three. Final draft of the toolkit is comprised of 9 items. Reliability of the toolkit was found by test re-test method and it was .89. Content validity and construct validity of the toolkit was also established.