New Delhi: On the occasion of Teachers’ Day, the fourth edition of Pearson Voice of Teacher Survey, 2016 is released. Through the report, the teaching community has collectively voiced their opinion on the current engagement level of Indian students and also identified the critical enablers to enhance student engagement. According to the survey, teachers said that only 55% of the students are actively engaged in learning. Students in Telangana (63%) are most engaged while students in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat (49%) are lowest engaged, the report revealed.
The survey has made an attempt to highlight the significant variation in student engagement – by institution, level and states. In Karnataka 61% of students and in Bihar and 59% are actively engaged while in Haryana and 48% in Kerala each 48% students are engaged. Bihar saw the highest increase in the engagement levels with 89% compared to previous year, finds the report. On the adequacy of teacher training, 79% of respondent teachers have agreed on this while Haryana has the highest disagreement (64%) on this. The report’s State level perspective segment covers 15 states in India.
Digging further into the engagement levels among private and public schools, Pearson Voice of Teacher Survey, 2016 says that students from government schools are far less engaged (51%) than those in private schools (67%). Further, student engagement is perceived to drop from the school level (61%) to higher education level (50%). Use of personal gadgets by students and lack of parental support are the key deterrents to student engagement.
The Pearson report also highlighted the root causes of poor student engagement. The teachers (29%) feel that excessive use of personal gadgets by students and lack of parental support (12%) are the key deterrents to student engagement. The survey included 12 key inhibitors to engagement. Particularly, in private schools across India, excessive use of personal gadgets by students (27%), lack of parental support (24%) and too much pressure to perform (15%) are identified as top factors for low student engagement. Lack of parental support (43%) is a much bigger barrier to student engagement in government schools, followed by challenges faced by students outside of school/ college (13%) and their past performance (11%).
Mr. Deepak Mehrotra, Managing Director, Pearson India said, “While the teachers feel that excessive use of personal gadgets is an inhibitor to student engagement, interestingly, they have also shown widespread acceptance for technology aid in the learning process. This clearly calls for building a framework to effectively integrate the technology platform into traditional learning to achieve desired student engagement levels and learning outcomes,”
As a silver lining the report mentioned that 59% of overall teachers surveyed believed that the student engagement level has increased in the past five years. The upward student engagement trend is not only identified by the private school teachers (81%), but also by government school teachers (74%). However, at higher education level, the improvement in student engagement is more subdued as compared to schools, with only 41% teachers in private and government colleges seeing improvement in engagement.
The survey, conducted in July 2016 – August 2016, represents the views of 6,494 teachers from schools and higher education institutes across 546 cities and towns, teaching over 18.9 lakh students in the country. Spire Research and Consulting, one of the leading strategic market intelligence consultancies in Asia Pacific region, partnered with Pearson for this survey.
