Shimla: In order to have an academic auditing system to account for huge amount of public funding being spent on education and for having a comparable education standard across the country, National Testing Service (NTS) has been created by human resource ministry for evolving a centralised mechanism to cater to the evaluation requirements.
Spelling out the objectives of the mission Pon Subbiah, head NTS-India, said national, regional and local norms for all seven levels of general education are proposed to be developed.
Instruments of evaluation (tools and scales) in the disciplines of language and literature are proposed to be developed before extending it to other disciplines. These instruments would be standardised through 60 regional field units (RFUs) established by NTS in order to build up national consensus, disseminate information, prepare tools and scales, administer them in the field, collect data, make an analysis, and to come out with conclusions, said Subbiah.
Some of the RFUs are located in the state capitals of the country Srinagar (Jammu & Kashmir), Shimla (Himachal Pradesh), Dehradun (Uttaranchal), Delhi (UT of Delhi), Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh), Chennai (Tamil Nadu), and Pondicherry (UT of Puducherry)], he added.
He said that in order to provide a comprehensive basis for developing the tools of evaluation, a Concept Based Continuum of Graded Syllabi (CCGS) needed to be developed.
“NTS has set up three task groups for Research & Development (R & D), Survey & Documentation (S & D) and Consultancy & Training (C & T) to plan and formulate the basic frameworks and subsequently execute them for the benefit of the society at large. It also proposes to train 16000 teachers of various levels and disciplines in this context,†he said.
A sub-scheme called Grant-in-Aid has been created within NTS to extend financial support to the individuals and institutions for developing materials and manpower in Evaluation. Apart from this, 45 Research Fellowships in Hindi, Tamil and Urdu per annum (30 Doctoral and 15 Post Doctoral) have also been instituted to encourage the young researchers to take up the advance studies in this inter-disciplinary area, disclosed professor Subbiah.
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