india

Updated: Aug 13, 2019 17:17 IST

To improve the results in state-run schools in English, science and maths, the Odisha government will double the duration of classes in these subjects from 45 minutes to 90 minutes.

Odisha school and mass education minister Samir Das said reviews of exam results over the past years have shown that most students who had failed or scored poorly, had done so in these three subjects.

“So, we have decided that from this year on, students will study these subjects for one-and-half-hours at a stretch, instead of 45 minutes. However, the class duration of other subjects will be of 45 minutes as usual,” said Das.

The department has sent a directive to the heads of all schools to prepare a routine accordingly.

The minister also said to provide quality English education to students from the primary level, a school in each district will be chosen for a pilot project consisting of special classes.

“The project will be implemented from this year onwards at a selected school in each district. The project will be implemented at block and lower levels from the next academic year,” Das said.

Odisha’s school and mass education department manages over 60,000 schools in the state and is responsible for the education of about 650,000 students. The National Achievement Survey(NAS) conducted by the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) in 2018 found that only 53% of students in Odisha were able to answer questions on basic competencies correctly.

As per NAS 2018, conducted across 248 schools in 12 districts of the state, the percentage of students of Class 3 of Odisha who could listen, recognise words and read with comprehension was lower than the national average.

Students also performed lower than the national average in almost all mathematical abilities, except place value. Odisha’s performance was worse than neighbouring states of Jharkhand and West Bengal.

Similarly, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) (Rural), 2018 revealed that only 33.1% students of Class 5 could recognise numbers between 10 and 99 while just 24.5% could do subtraction.