Bringing laggard children up to speed

One of the positive developments in early 21st century education worldwide is a renewed interest in measuring learning outcomes. There’s new awareness within the larger educators’ community that there’s more to education than mere classroom attendance. Since 2004 the Mumbai-based NGO Pratham has begun publishing its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) which highlights the abysmal learning outcomes of government primaries in rural India. The ASER reports have forced the Central and state governments to pay attention to learning outcomes and remedial education issues. Ditto the No Child Left Behind Act 2001 legislated by the federal government in the US. One of the consequences of the new emphasis on actual learning and remedial education is the establishment of Learning Resource Centres (LRCs) — where small groups of children of below-average performance are given remedial education. Currently every respectable (i.e. private) school in the metros, has established or is contemplating LRCs, to provide the additional support required to help laggard children come up to speed. In years of working with special groups, I have developed several simple and effective pedagogies to help children reposition themselves in their classes by becoming active learners. I would like to share these simple pedago-gies with teachers/readers of EducationWorld. Difficulty in reading, is an early sign of falling behind and such students can be easily identified in the initial grades. However children unable to comprehend or process words as they read are more difficult to identify because they read well. Only when they reach third or fourth grade parents/teachers may discover that they have been reading without comprehension. Therefore they need remedial education in the form of assistance in understanding words and passages. The plain truth is that most children (and adults) prefer to think in pictures. The major problem of children with comprehension difficulties is picturisation of words. They need stories, anecdotes and simulated situations which associate words with pictures. To this end I have compiled a collection of 500 picture cards — 350 common nouns, 50 verbs, 50 adjectives, 15 basic prepositions — for children in LRCs and classrooms. The cards provide bi-sensory stimulation of audio and visual inputs. A set of 25 cards is shown in quick succession — at the rate of one card per second, keeping students engrossed for 30 seconds in a session. Interspersed with anecdotes using words connected with the visuals, their attention is held for half an hour. The next half hour is spent in an exercise termed ‘language through association’. Picture cards associated with words like fat elephant, lovely house, run fast, drawn from previous reading sessions are strewn on the floor for children to mix and match. After a short break of 15 minutes spent in talking and listening to children, a further half hour is allocated where words related to the pictures are introduced simultaneously — associating picture cards with words without ambiguity, mixing and matching them. The whole set is revised quickly the next day and pictures and words correctly matched set apart. This learning programme is repeated in each…