EDUCATION IMPROVES KNOWLEDGE

EDUCATION IMPROVES KNOWLEDGE 

Some strategies for improving education quality include investing in teacher training and professional development, promoting innovation and technology integration in the classroom, and enhancing student engagement and motivation. Education is a crucial component of building a better society.

Improving education quality is essential for ensuring that all students have access to high-quality education and are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in today's rapidly changing world.

The Role of Schools in Building a Strong Knowledge Base

Students discover their initial structured education settings at school through core subjects that include math, science, geography, history, literature and more.  These lend students the basic foundation needed to succeed. And this forms the basis of building further on essential life skills like communication, problem-solving and decision-making.

Dedicated teaching faculties further enrich this experience. Teachers play a critical role in nurturing curiosity and critical thinking by using interactive teaching methods, engaging discussions and practical activities. Through education, students learn to analyse while also acquiring skills for questioning through innovative thinking. Schools with interactive learning methods, hands-on experiments and research-based projects encourage students to think independently and solve problems effectively. These skills are essential for success in personal and professional life.

Instilling Discipline, Time Management and Responsibility

Education teaches students the importance of discipline, time management and personal responsibility. Steering both flexible and well-disciplined teaching environments enables students to track goals and time while developing academic and personal maturity. These in turn help students develop resilience, allowing them to approach challenges with confidence.

Student involvement in assignments and group work steers them to develop responsibility and skills which transcend academic boundaries into their everyday personal and professional roles.

Prioritising Mental Well-Being and Emotional Intelligence

The importance of emotional intelligence in today's era can never be overemphasised. Schools today integrate mental and emotional wellbeing in its daily routines, as a way of school life. Psychological counselling, mindfulness sessions and stress management workshops go a long way in creating a nurturing ambience where children build emotional resilience, self-awareness and a positive outlook toward challenges.

UNESCO underscores that education is a fundamental human right and a cornerstone for peace, poverty eradication, and sustainable development. However, access to education alone is insufficient; the quality of education is essential. 

Poor learning quality has profound and lasting consequences on both life and employment outcomes. When students do not acquire literacy, numeracy, social-emotional and critical thinking skills, they face significant barriers to furthering their education, securing decent employment in a rapidly evolving and increasingly knowledge-based labour markets, and participating meaningfully in society. UNESCO estimates that 754 million young people and adults are unable to read or write at a basic level, which undermines their capacity to improve their lives and contribute productively to their communities. 

Science of learning

UNESCO facilitates an international community of practice on the science of learning for education gathering policymakers, educators and researchers together to collaborate on translating the evidence from the science of learning for education policy and practice.

The science of learning is a scientific endeavor that bands together fields like cognitive science, education, linguistics and neuroscience, among others, to address how children learn. These fields have informed our accumulated knowledge of how the brain learns and the symbiotic relationship between brain development and the learning environment that shapes an individual’s learning trajectory. Using scientific evidence to design more effective curricula, teaching methods and assessment practices can truly transform education, improving its quality.

Activity Based Learning (ABL) is an instructional approach that emphasises learning through active participation rather than passive reception. It is based on the philosophy that children learn best when they engage with concepts through experiments, play, projects, and hands-on exercises.

Key characteristics of an activity centred curriculum include:

Student Engagement: Encourages curiosity and self-driven learning.

Practical Learning: Uses real-world applications to reinforce concepts.

Collaborative Environment: Promotes teamwork and communication skills.

Diverse Learning Methods: Incorporates storytelling, role-playing, puzzles, and games to cater to different learning styles.

Benefits of Activity Based Learning for Children

Here are some benefits of this method:

Enhances Knowledge Retention: Learning through activity based teaching helps children remember concepts better as they actively engage with the material.

Develops Critical Thinking Skills: Encourages students to analyse, question, and solve problems rather than memorise answers.

Encourages Creativity: An activity centred curriculum allows children to express their ideas freely and develop innovative solutions.

Builds Confidence and Communication Skills: Group projects and discussions improve social skills and boost self-esteem.

Makes Learning Fun and Interactive: Incorporating school based activities like role-plays, science experiments, and field trips makes education more enjoyable.

Bridges the Learning Gap: Helps slow learners grasp concepts better through personalised and interactive learning experiences.

Our Role in Expanding Activity Based Learning

At Bal Raksha Bharat, an education NGO, we believe that every child deserves access to quality education, regardless of their socio-economic background. While government initiatives have made significant progress, our work focuses on ensuring that activity based learning reaches the most marginalised communities, giving less privileged children a chance to learn, grow, and thrive.

Setting Up Learning Centres: We establish classrooms that follow an activity-centred curriculum, making learning engaging and interactive for marginalised children.

Teacher Training: We equip educators with innovative activity based teaching strategies to enhance student participation and comprehension.

Mobile Learning Programmes: We bring the activity based curriculum to remote areas through digital and mobile classrooms, ensuring learning continues beyond traditional settings.

Community Engagement: We actively involve parents and local communities in their children’s education through workshops and hands-on school based activities.

Educational attainment strongly influences labour market participation, whether measured by employment, unemployment or inactivity rates. Across OECD countries, individuals aged 25-34 without an upper secondary degree show an average employment rate of approximately 60%, while those with a tertiary qualification exhibit an 87% employment rate. Conversely, unemployment rates drop from 13% to 5%, and inactivity rates decrease from 31% to 9% for the same age group. This correlation between educational attainment and labour market participation remains consistent for both genders and has remained stable over decades, even with a substantial rise in attainment levels across the OECD.

Education systems use a range of tools and indicators based on demographic, administrative and contextual data to monitor, evaluate and ensure quality. Data on student learning outcomes are widely available through national standardised assessments. International benchmarking, specific reviews and stakeholder and longitudinal surveys are also increasingly common. Most countries have developed comprehensive national indicator frameworks and report statistics and indicators in annual publications. 

We need robust measures of AI capabilities

Understanding how AI can affect the economy and society – and the education system that prepares students for both – requires an understanding of the capabilities of this technology and their development trajectory. Moreover, AI capabilities need to be compared to human skills to understand where AI can replace humans and where it can complement them. This knowledge base will help predict which tasks AI may automate and, consequently, how AI may shift the demand for skills. Policy makers can use this information to reshape education systems in accordance with future skills needs and to develop tailored labour-market policies.

Teachers’ beliefs about using artificial intelligence

Much of the research on teachers’ intention to use technology is also relevant to the use of artificial intelligence tools in their teaching practice. Research on the adoption of AI in schools also suggests that other factors may predict teachers’ intended engagement with such tools. These include the understanding and minimising of any related ethical issues; teacher trust in the underlying AI; whether the AI tool generates any additional workload for teachers; the provision of additional teacher support in using AI in their practice; and principals’ digital leadership (Cheng and Wang, 2023; Cukurova,Miao and Brooker, 2023).The emerging literature on AI in education (AIED) also highlights the known and possible opportunities that AI tools might provide to teachers, and, by extension, to learners. These include, among other benefits: AI chatbots as an additional scaffolding resource for students; AI assistants relieving administrative burden from teachers; recommendations for extension work or extra support produced by AI; generative AI tools helping produce lesson plans, and activities or schemes of work ( U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, 2023).

Apart from providing new possibilities, the use of AIED also presents challenges, which include those from the literature around the ethical use of AI in general, as well as those targeted at the use of AI in an education setting. For example, interfaces that students interact with through AIED tools can include AI agents, video capture or NLP tools that might capture and analyse learners’ facial reactions or the spoken or written word. Collecting, storing, and analysing such personally identifiable data creates concerns as to the ownership and use of children’s identities by corporations and others. Protecting the privacy of students while providing solutions that consider the individual needs and characteristics of learners is also a concern among teachers (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, 2023). Teachers tend to worry that AI will not be able to engage diverse learners due to biases in underlying data or incorrect or insufficient scaffolding (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, 2023. Experts agree that there is a need to promote a better understanding of, and building trust in, AIED systems to improve adoption of these technologies in schools .

Improvement science centers real problems of practice and acknowledges the significant role systems play in shaping outcomes. It offers a method for transforming systems and making enduring progress on education’s most persistent challenges. A cornerstone of Carnegie’s approach has been the development and support of networked improvement communities (NICs)—intentionally designed communities of practitioners, researchers, and community members that unite expertise and creativity around a common aim. Guided by shared theories of improvement and disciplined by the rigorous methods of improvement research, NICs have proven instrumental in accelerating innovation and integrating solutions into diverse educational contexts on a broad scale. As stakeholders work together in these ways they learn new ways to name and solve challenges, build evidence of efficacy of solutions, and activate collective agency to power ongoing improvement.

Practical measurement for improvement is the deliberate gathering, analysis, and interpretation of information that enhances the learning of system actors as they test changes and improve processes that are at the heart of their work. Practical measures are “practical” in that they can be collected, analyzed, and used within the daily work lives of practitioners. They are also “practical” in that they reflect practice. Practical measures are used to identify improvement goals and to learn continuously whether the changes that are introduced are, in fact, leading to improvement.

To determine if a measure is actually “practical,” some key questions to consider include:

Is it closely tied to a theory of improvement? In an improvement effort, an individual measure is part of a system of measures that is used to interrogate a working theory of improvement.

Does the measure provide actionable information to drive positive changes in practice? The data provided by the measure should point to actions that users can take in order to improve targeted practices or processes.

How well does it capture variability in performance? To drive improvement, the measure and resulting data should indicate what is working for whom and under what conditions, disaggregating outcomes based on appropriate subgroups, contexts, or conditions.

Does it demonstrate predictive validity? Practical measures are often connected to a larger theory of improvement, which represents a causal chain or hypothesis about how to reach the desired outcome. To serve a signaling purpose, an individual measure related to one aspect of that hypothesis should predict the next measure down the causal chain. For instance, a process measure should predict a driver measure, and a driver measure should predict leading indicators. 

Is it minimally burdensome to users? Since practical measures are intended to be embedded into users’ daily work, it’s important to minimize any additional effort or time that they might require.

Does it report results in a timely manner? Target users should find the measure and resulting data valuable, which often means that data is reported quickly and is easy to understand.

To what extent does it attend to social processes of use in order to support building an improvement culture? When developing and implementing a practical measure, it is important to attend to social processes including but not limited to establishing trust among users and routines for analyzing data.

What is new is the attention to networking as a scientific strategy to extend human capabilities in pursuit of shared interests. Also new are understandings about how to effectively implement networks and useful tools and processes for doing so. And what is most especially new is networks, enhanced by modern technologies, using improvement science to solve problems of practice in healthcare, education, and other social sectors. It is in the joining together of these two big ideas that affords great promise for accelerating educators’ efforts to improve our nation’s schools.

No matter what the problem being addressed, the chances are that someone somewhere in the NIC has wrestled with it, or at least some of its component parts. The range of expertise and experience within the NIC can provide a wealth of ideas for testing as possible improvements. Second, NICs provide diverse contexts within which to test those ideas. By their nature, NICs subsume a variety of settings in which to test innovations. Such testing across contexts is essential in order to learn how to implement effective ideas reliably and at scale. Third, NICs provide the social connections that accelerate testing and diffusion. A well conceived and supported NIC builds trusting relationships that allow members to respect the contributions that each brings to the collective effort. Fourth, NICs provide a safe environment in which to engage comparative analyses. Such analyses, based upon measures held in common, are essential to enable insights about persistent problems or places where such problems have been successfully addressed.