60 to 65% students in Karnataka are below average in proficiency in reading: NCERT FSL report

Bengaluru

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has released the ‘Foundational Learning Study-2022 (FLS)’ report, according to which around 60 to 65% Karnataka students are below the average in proficiency in reading.

The National Education Policy (NEP-2020) has pointed out that the ability to read and write and perform basic operation with numbers, is a necessary foundation and an indispensable prerequisite for all future schooling and lifelong learning.

As a first step, the Department of School Education and Literacy set up a National Mission for Universalisation of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy called ‘National Initiative for Proficiency Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat).

The mission aims to ensure that all children by the end of Class III achieve foundational learning standards by 2026-27.

Following this, the NCERT conducted a large-scale FLS in March, 2022. FLS covered Class III students and aims to benchmark foundational literacy, numeracy skills in 20 Indian languages, including Kannada, which will enable to track the progress of child.

Approximately, 86,000 Class III students from 10,000 government, aided, and unaided schools were covered in the survey. As many as 2,368 students from 263 schools in Karnataka were part of this study.

As per the results of the study, 18% of students can read up to 13 words correctly with comprehension in one minute. As many as 38% students can read 14 to 29 words, 28% can read up to 48 words, and 16% can read 49 and above words in one minute.