Edu Dept to study socio-economy of rural students for better results

Balwant Garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, May 26

In the awake of poor results, the Education Department has decided to study the socio-economic factors playing a role in the education of rural students.

Besides the impact of caste, habitation, school and teacher-related factors, the study also aimed at studying landholding or economic status of the family.

“Since education is a multivariate phenomenon, so all these factor play an important role in learning,” said Parshant Goyal, Director General of School Education (DGSE), Punjab.

Inviting the expression of interest (EOI) from universities and research institutes in the state to conduct the study, the Education Department said the study would consist of reasonable number of households covering different heterogeneous regions, representing Doaba, Malwa and Majha, as also semi-hilly and plain areas and also across agriculturally developed, backward, bet and border areas of the state.

“As Punjab is mainly an agrarian state and most of the students in government schools belong to a cross-section of society which is directly or indirectly associated with the agriculture sector in the rural area so their unsatisfactory learning level necessitates that a study need to be conducted to find out the reason for their persistent lower levels of learning,” said the DGSE.

The sample would comprise households from all categories of rural workforce.

The performance of government school students is comparatively low as compared to private schools so the study will help the department find out the correlation among the landholding families and the school they chose for their children and the level of their learning, said Goyal.

So far, there are many studies conducted to understand the relationship between education and economic growth by sociologists in the country, but it is perhaps a first-of-its-kind study, said sources in the department.

Atotal of 51.39 lakh students are enrolled in government, government-aided and private schools in the sate. Of these, 22.41 lakh students are enrolled in government primary (10.43 lakh students), middle (1.44 lakh), high (3.15 lakh) and government senior secondary schools (7.37 lakh) in the state.