WIllima Wadhwa, Director ASER centre says 'foundational learning - a vital need in India and the world'

Led by the work done in India by Pratham and ASER, this consortium of organisations, known as the PAL Network, has now launched a foundational assessment in maths — International Common Assessment of Numeracy (ICAN) — that uses the same items across all countries. ICAN includes simple tasks in the domains of number knowledge, measurement, geometry and data display.

The assessment is aligned to Unesco’s Global Proficiency Framework for SDG 4.1.1(a) for Classes 2 and 3. A pilot assessment in one district of each of the 13 countries (including India) was done in 2019 and the report was launched earlier this week.

ICAN is an open source oral one-on-one assessment, available in 11 languages, aligned to the measurement of SDG minimum proficiency, that is easy to implement and scale up.

In the context of the current pandemic-related crisis, it becomes even more important to understand where children are with respect to basic reading and arithmetic skills. As schools start to open up, the first job of the day will be to assess where children are at and how much ground has been lost.

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