Students educational achievement at school Level: An analysis across social categories

Abstract

History has evidenced the power of education to induce changes (Flecha, 2011) in society. There could be disagreement about what consists of quality education or educational achievement of students, but hardly people disagree on the importance of quality educational outcomes for all students. Whether students are attaining desirable learning outcomes as expected is the question that needs to be addressed. Accordingly, in this paper the performance of students across the stages of schooling, and over the period of time is presented to provide a snapshot of the quality educational outcomes. The analysis is based on the students’ performance in achievement surveys in three cycles in Class III and VIII surveys, and four cycles of Class V that have been conducted by NCERT between 2001 - 2016. The achievement of the students is compared across social categories and analyzed in the backdrop of educational qualification and occupational status of parents. The analysis is based on performance in mathematics and languages only. The findings reveal that higher socio-economic status has a positive influence on students mean achievement and the performance of SC and ST students is lower than that of OBC and General category students in general across the cycles.