Life Skills Collaborative’s (LSC) Assessment Tools received high praise and support during a 2-day workshop in Mizoram. The workshop, organised by Mizoram State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in Aizawl from November 30th to December 1st, 2021, saw representation from 11 assessment experts from Samagra, the Education Department, SCERT, DIET, NGOs, and Mizoram University. The workshop was coordinated by Magic Bus, LSC’s government engagement partner for Mizoram. Members from four other LSC partner organisations  – Sattva, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), Centre for Science of Student Learning (CSSL), and Dream a Dream – also attended the workshop.

When asked about the learnings of the workshop, DIET experts said “The assessment tools were very comprehensive, concise and insightful. The dimensions being taken from respective areas made the tool rich and took into consideration the understanding and capacity of children to respond to the assessments”.

Experts from Samagra also expressed support for the tools by saying “Getting reliable and exhaustive data on life skills will help state education departments strengthen their decisions around life skills education and educate the community regarding the importance of life skills”.

Experts from SCERT added “Assessments for life skills will change our perspectives around how we think and understand life skills education. Given NEP has proposed the focus on life skills, LSC tools are complementing and extending that aim to action”.

Workshop Highlights

Day 1 began with an introduction to the LSC and the assessment tools. There was a deeper emphasis on the approach to design and construction and the process of creating the Future Readiness, Wellbeing and Teacher tools. The last session of day 1 and entire day 2 of the workshop involved a deep dive into reviewing the three assessment tools, sharing feedback, and a focus on key learnings from the workshop.

Dedicated groups were created to discuss the tools and the tool items. The assessment experts were also requested to provide feedback on English to Mizo and Mizo to English translation to double-check the tool language translation. The feedback provided by the assessment experts on state-specific context proved to be extremely helpful in contextualizing the tools before being validated and tested with school students.

Data Collection

The tool validation exercise was carried out from December 2nd to 6th in Kolasib and Lunglei districts of Mizoram. The Wellbeing tool saw a total of 588 students being tested across the 2 districts (299 in the junior section and 289 in the senior section). The Future Readiness tool saw a total of 127 students (60 in Kolasib and 67 in Lunglei).

LSC believes that the workshop will be a great leap forward in the educational development of Mizoram and the valuable feedback received from the experts will form the basis for designing Life Skills specific curricula for students in the coming future.