Personalised, Adaptive Learning Program Begins In Rajasthan

The outbreak of Covid-19 has created massive gaps in learning, especially for girls in non-urban areas. It has forced the entire education industry to bring up the inevitable changes in its functioning. 

Rajasthan government has successfully completed a pilot for Mission Buniyaad - an ambitious Personalised and Adaptive Learning  (PAL) program aiming to recoup learning level loss due to Covid-19 for 1 million adolescent girls and 2 million students in Rajasthan. The education minister of Rajasthan, Dr Bulaki Das Kalla, and Minister of State, Education, Smt. Zahida Khan announced the state-wide scale-up of Mission Buniyaad at an event on Monday to commemorate Teachers’ Day.

The EdTech pilot was conducted among 35,000 girl students in six districts - Udaipur, Bhilwara, Sikar, Karauli, Dhaulpur, and Sirohi, with an average learning outcome improvement of 16 per cent between baseline and endline. The six-month pilot included grade 8-12 students spending two hours per week on digital devices for personalized and adaptive learning (PAL) and in-person school instruction. 

Overall, the PAL intervention has produced early signs of extremely promising success in a short time, given that a change of 0.2 SD and above in a year is considered significant in educational interventions. As part of the program, third-party assessments were administered covering eight subjects to students distributed in Tablet and Control groups, selected through stratified random sampling.