Pratham USA

Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has drawn attention to a learning crisis in India and motivated policy change by mobilizing volunteers to visit households and assess the basic reading and math skills of over half a million children every year. This grant will help the ASER Centre adapt its annual survey of learning to also measure skills at early childhood, middle school, and secondary school levels. The ASER Centre will ensure that the findings help expand the conversation about learning to a broader set of skills and reach audiences who can do something about the results. The ASER Centre will also help government teacher-training centers and other institutions build capacity for generating and using evidence.

Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has drawn attention to a learning crisis in India and motivated policy change by mobilizing volunteers to visit households across the country and test over 600,000 children. This grant would help the ASER Centre to strengthen its success by continuing an annual survey of learning. It would also allow ASER Centre to conduct research to understand why learning levels are so low, and create tools for measuring a broader set of educational outcomes (beyond basic reading and math). ASER also expects to expand its training programs to build government capacity for generating and absorbing evidence.

With this grant, Pratham USA, a successful longtime grantee, would continue improving learning achievement in India’s primary grades through three interlinked activities: (1) ongoing creation and testing of better instructional practice and delivery models; (2) implementation of these models in demonstration areas to show how learning can be improved; and (3) mainstreaming the most successful models through collaborations with state and district governments.