25% Of Rural Teenagers Struggle To Read Grade 2 Texts Fluently: Report

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023, by Pratham Foundation published on 17 January 2024 reveals that nearly 43 per cent of children in rural India cannot read sentences in English and 25 per cent struggle to read a Class 2 level text in their respective regional languages.

Female students (76 per cent) do better than males (70.9 per cent) in reading grade 2nd level text in their regional language, while male students do better than their female counterparts in arithmetic and reading English text. A large proportion of youth do not have basic reading and numeracy skills. 

The ASER 2023 report, titled ‘Beyond Basics’, surveyed 34,745 youth enrolled in both government and private institutes in 28 districts across 26 states. Overall 86.8 per cent among 14-18 year olds are enrolled in either school or college while the enrollment percentage goes down with age.

For instance, the proportion of youth who are presently not enrolled in school or college increases with age from 3.9 per cent of 14-year-olds to 10.9 per cent of 16-year-olds and 32.6 per cent of 18-year-olds, the report underlined.

Noting that one of the main worries at the time of the coronavirus pandemic was that with livelihoods being threatened, older children would drop out of school, the report highlights that the fear ‘turned out to be unfounded'. “The proportion of out-of-school children and youth has been secularly decreasing, led by the government’s push to universalise secondary education,” it stated.

Although, the reported underlined that while young people remain in school longer, there’s no major change in their foundational literacy and numeracy skills (FLN).

The survey also mapped the digital awareness of students, with males (43.7 per cent) being more than twice as likely to have their own smartphone than females (19.8 per cent). Females are less likely to know how to use a smartphone or computer compared to males.

Also, calculating the length with a scale, the investigation found that whereas over 85 per cent of the youngsters polled could do so when the starting point was 0 cm, the proportion fell significantly to 39 per cent when the starting point was changed.

For the first time, the ASER also registered the course stream of students enrolled in grades 11 and 12 and in college. In grade 11 and 12, 54 per cent are enrolled in arts and humanities, 9.3 per cent in commerce and 33.7 per cent in science. Analysing the gender aspect of the steam divide, the report said that female students are less likely to be enrolled in the STEM stream (28.1 per cent) than males (36.3 per cent).

The report further revealed that students who are enrolled in science in class 11 and 12 are high performers in grade 9 so as to have been selected into the science stream and are therefore more likely to be at grade level.

Pratham Foundation is an education-focussed non-profit organisation.