Learnings from developing large-scale direct assessment of social and emotional development for ASER 2019 'Early Years' survey in rural India

• In Event: ECD measurment and assessment: Student, classroom, and home-based measures

Proposal

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a crucial aspect in the development of a child as well as the creation of a healthy society. SEL comprises a number of skills: understanding one’s own emotions and that of others, managing these emotions to maintain healthy relationships and take socially responsible decisions. As with academic skills, social and emotional skills are transferable, meaning that they can be taught and learnt, both in formal (school and after-school programs) and informal (community, family) learning experiences. These skills influence how individuals manage their feelings and behave in different social situations.

Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is an annual assessment that aims to generate evidence on children’s learning levels in rural India. Released in early 2020, ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ was the first large-scale assessment to collect data on a number of developmental indicators relating to cognitive, early language and numeracy and social and emotional abilities of young children in the age group of 4-8. The survey was conducted in 26 districts across 24 states in India with a sample of approximately 37,000 children.

This paper discusses how the SEL domain was addressed in ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’. It provides detailed information on the process of selecting and designing the assessment format and tasks for a large-scale assessment of SEL skills.

Selecting the assessment format: SEL assessments can be broadly categorised into four types: self-reported questionnaires, interviews, observation scales and performance-based or direct assessments. The first three of these are commonly used to assess SEL in children. These methods are very often designed, implemented and their results are interpreted by skilled assessors or experts. In ASER, local citizens conduct the assessment and collect data to be presented in an easy to understand format. Hence, an assessment methodology that calls for skilled assessors’ interpretation of responses is not possible. On the other hand, direct assessments assess the child’s response by approximating real-world situations, decreasing the scope for subjective judgements or third party biases. These assessments use the child’s performance on a given set of tasks as a direct measure of their SEL skills and are hence the most suitable for the ASER model. Some common forms of these assessments are computer-generated simulations with an interactive user interface (e.g. SELWeb, ZooU).

Selecting and designing assessment tasks: Since emotions are the building blocks for SEL development, the focus for SEL tasks in ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ was emotional knowledge and management. SEL tasks – emotion identification and situation to emotion mapping assessed children’s self-awareness. A situation reaction test administered for a conflict situation assessed children’s self-regulation ability, and another one administered for an empathy situation assessed children’s social awareness. Considering the young age group to be assessed, the emotion identification and situation to emotion mapping tasks for this assessment were aided by visual stimuli in the form of ‘emotion cards’, which were visual representations of four primary human emotions. Many assessments like SELWeb and IDELA use visual aids to represent emotions. However, the emotion cards designed for ASER were innovated to be as close to reality as possible, avoiding animated representations that show amplified versions of emotions in other instruments. The illustrations used in ASER’s emotion cards were based on Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System that portrays emotions in a way that is universal in nature with no variability across regions or ethnicities (Ekman and Friesen, 1978). Both the emotion cards and hypothetical situations for tasks, were extensively piloted in the language of the children, across the country, in ten rounds over a span of six months.

Additionally, the paper briefly describes policy guidelines, curricular frameworks, learning outcome documents that stress on the importance of development of these SEL competencies in young children. It presents detailed findings from ASER ‘Early Years’ on each of these competencies as evidence to reinforce the need for educators to focus on building SEL skills in young children in practice.

Author

• Setu Loomba, ASER Centre, Delhi