Project: ASER Education Survey

Areas: Sehore District Block- Sehore Villages Covered-60

Target Group:  1568 Children’s Pre School age 4 to 8 in rural areas

Objective of Project: Sampled children's pre-school and school enrollment status was recorded. Children did a variety of cognitive, early language, and early numeracy tasks

Sponsor Agency: Pratham Education-New Delhi

Project Activity & Outcome:

ASER 2019 'Early Years' was conducted in one district in Madhya Pradesh, one of which is Sehore. The survey reached a total of 60 villages, 1,208 households, and 1,568 children in the age group 4 to 8. Sampled children's pre-school and school enrollment status was recorded. Children did a variety of cognitive, early language, and early numeracy tasks. Activities to assess children's social and emotional development were also undertaken. All tasks were done one-on-one with children in their homes. In the following pages, data is presented in three sub-sections

■ Pre-school and school enrollment: This section provides a snapshot of all children in the ASER 'Early Years' sample in terms of their pre-school and school enrollment status, separately by age and pre-school/school type

■ Early learning tasks: Ability levels and expectations of children in the pre-primary age group are very different than those for older children. This section presents data on cognitive skills, early language, and early numeracy ability for children age 4 and 5. It also provides data on children’s ability to identify emotions as a key indicator of their social and emotional development.

■ Children in early primary grades: This section presents data on children's performance by grade for children in Std I, II and III, in order to look at the progression of children’s ability level over the first three years of primary school. over the first three years of primary school.

Implicit Theories

One of the most important discoveries about the developing mind is how early and significantly very young children, even starting in infancy, are uniting disparate observations or discrete facts into coherent conceptual systems . From very early on, children are not simply passive observers, registering the superficial appearance of things. Rather, they are building explanatory systems—implicit theories—that organize their knowledge. Such implicit theories contain causal principles and causal relations; these theories enable children to predict, explain, and reason about relevant phenomena and, in some cases, intervene to change them. As early as the first year of life, babies are developing incipient theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operates. It is important to point out that these foundational theories are not simply isolated forms of knowledge, but play a profound role in children's everyday lives and subsequent education.

Infants' Sensitivity to Teaching Cues: Implications for Adults

Babies have the capacity to realize when someone is communicating something for their benefit and therefore to construe information differently than when they merely witness it. When adults use face-to-face contact, call a baby's name, and point for the baby's benefit, these signals lead babies to recognize that someone is teaching them something, and this awareness can affect how and what they learn.