Bringing laggard children up to speed
One of the positive developments in early 21st century education worldwide is a renewed interest in measuring learning outcomes. There’s new awareness within the larger educators’ community that there’s more to education than mere classroom attendance. Since 2004 the Mumbai-based NGO Pratham has begun publishing its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) which highlights the abysmal learning outcomes of government primaries in rural India. The ASER reports have forced the Central and state governments to pay attention to learning outcomes and remedial education issues. Ditto the No Child Left Behind Act 2001 legislated by the federal government in the US.One of the consequences of the new emphasis on actual learning and remedial education is the establishment of Learning Resource Centres (LRCs)  where small groups of children of below-average performance are given remedial education. Currently every respectable (i.e. private) school in the metros, has established or is contemplating LRCs, to provide the additional support required to help laggard children come up to speed. In years of working with special groups, I have developed several simple and effective pedagogies to help children reposition themselves in their classes by becoming active learners. I would like to share these simple pedago-gies with teachers/readers of EducationWorld.
Difficulty in reading, is an early sign of falling behind and such students can be easily identified in the initial grades. However children unable to comprehend or process words as they read are more difficult to identify because they read well. Only when they reach third or fourth grade parents/teachers may discover that they have been reading without comprehension. Therefore they need remedial education in the form of assistance in understanding words and passages.
The plain truth is that most children (and adults) prefer to think in pictures. The major problem of children with comprehension difficulties is picturisation of words. They need stories, anecdotes and simulated situations which associate words with pictures.
To this end I have compiled a collection of 500 picture cards  350 common nouns, 50 verbs, 50 adjectives, 15 basic prepositions  for children in LRCs and classrooms. The cards provide bi-sensory stimulation of audio and visual inputs. A set of 25 cards is shown in quick succession  at the rate of one card per second, keeping students engrossed for 30 seconds in a session. Interspersed with anecdotes using words connected with the visuals, their attention is held for half an hour.
The next half hour is spent in an exercise termed ‘language through association’. Picture cards associated with words like fat elephant, lovely house, run fast, drawn from previous reading sessions are strewn on the floor for children to mix and match. After a short break of 15 minutes spent in talking and listening to children, a further half hour is allocated where words related to the pictures are introduced simultaneously  associating picture cards with words without ambiguity, mixing and matching them. The whole set is revised quickly the next day and pictures and words correctly matched set apart. This learning programme is repeated in each LRC (after school hours) for two weeks.
The next step is to place a set of completed (words with appropriate picture) cards on the floor. Children are asked to make sentences using the words displayed. To begin with, the sentences may be as simple as ‘I run fast’ (to school/home), establishing the basic principles of sentence construction. From here they move to creating sentences of their own from the picture cards displayed. The speed with which they learn is amazing. Success breeds success, and within a month, construction of more complex sentences is a mere step away. Pupils soon fall into a routine of word-visual assessment of about 25 words a day with ease and enthusiasm, and cease to be slow learners.
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nce initial curiosity is satisfied, children are ready to pay attention to details. A book is then read paragraph by paragraph and questions are asked about each para, easy ones graduating to the more complex. To take a simple instance, the sentence "Winnie the Pooh lived in the hundred acre woods" should prompt questions like: "Who is Winnie?" "Where does he live?" "What are woods?" "What is the area of the woods?" Children should be advised to study the illustrations in the book to answer these questions. The vital consideration is: does the child understand the question in context? Therefore encourage her to look for answers in the passage read out to the class. My experience is that within a month, so-called slow learners are able to answer such questions by themselves. The word cards are then looked at again in the new context to enable LRC students to spell by sight. Once a sufficiently large number of passages are read out, comprehended and spellings learnt, they are ready to write.
LRCs are critical enablers for slow and attention deficient learners. Irrespective of class or age, children led through this process exhibit remarkable progress.
(Aruna Raghavan is co-founder of Shikshayatan, a free school for children in rural Tamil Nadu)