One-on-one digital tests rolled out for Class 3; officials call it ‘mid-term analysis’ of NIPUN Bharat

THe subject assessment centre below the subject Council of Educational search and preparation (NCERT), PARAKH, is conducting one-on-one, tablet-based assessments of Class 3 students under the Foundational Learning Study (FLS) 2026, covering key skills such as comprehension, oral reading fluency and basic mathematics, with data collection expected to conclude by May-June 2026, officials said.Officials said that around 10,000 trained field investigators from District Institute of Education and Training (DIETs) are conducting FLS 2026 in a phased manner in 20 languages “using tablets in a one-on-one mode.” More than 1,00,000 Class 3 students across 10,000 government, government-aided and private schools in 776 districts in 36 states and Union territories will be assessed during the study.Officials said the results will serve as a “mid-term analysis” to assess progress under the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat), launched in July 2021 by Union education ministry to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) for children up to Grade 3 by 2026–27.The assessments cover students’ abilities in comprehension, oral reading fluency, decoding letters, and conceptual understanding of mathematics, among others. Data collection is set to wrap up by May-June 2026, with analysis to follow over the next three months, officials said.In FLS 2022, which covered 86,000 students in 10,000 schools, field investigators recorded children’s performance using Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets.“This time, we decided to ease that process by introducing tablets. The idea was to make data recording simpler and more efficient for field investigators. We conducted very rigorous training of investigators in March before starting FLS on March 23,” CEO and head of PARAKH Indrani Bhaduri told HT.Established in 2023 as an independent unit under NCERT as part of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 implementation, PARAKH—Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development—sets norms, standards and guidelines for student assessment across recognised school boards.During training for FLS 2026, investigators practised administering assessments on each other to familiarise themselves with the assessment tools and recording process. “A key component was ensuring inter-rater reliability. Two investigators assessed the same child independently, and their observations were compared. Only those with at least 85% concurrence were deployed; others underwent retraining,” she added.The exercise has been completed in 15 states and Union Territories, including Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Jammu and Kashmir, and will continue in phases elsewhere.FLS differs from the National Achievement Survey (NAS)—now called PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan—which is a large-scale, system-level assessment to evaluate overall learning outcomes across grades. While NAS is MCQ-based with no direct interaction, FLS is a one-on-one, performance-based assessment.“In FLS, we assess whether a child can decode letters, words and sentences, and measure oral reading fluency with comprehension. In mathematics, we focus on basic numeracy and conceptual understanding—such as recognising that multiplication is repeated addition and division is repeated subtraction,” Bhaduri said.She added that while FLS 2022 served as a baseline, FLS 2026 is a mid-term assessment to evaluate progress under NIPUN Bharat. “The findings will help states understand whether their interventions are working or need course correction. The third cycle will be an endline assessment after about two years,” she said.