Jaipur: Rajasthan’s education department will run an AI-based oral reading fluency campaign in English across all govt schools for Classes 3 to 8 from May 4 to 7.The campaign will assess students’ reading levels, place them into four learning-level categories, and roll out remedial activities based on the results. The model follows last year’s Hindi reading initiative, which grouped students by difficulty in letter and phoneme recognition, word reading, halting sentence or passage reading, and fluent reading with comprehension.An order issued by Sitaram Jat, director, education department, to all district education officers states, “It must be ensured that all teachers are fully apprised of the ‘Oral Reading Fluency – English’ programme and that the assessments are completed strictly within the stipulated timeframe.”Officials said every child will be given two paragraphs to read as per their learning level. If the child is not able to read it, then another paragraph of one level less, on the recommendation of the teacher, will be given to the child. Based on how the child reads it and explains the meaning, they will be categorised.Remedial methods will include peer learning and guided learning from the teacher, who will help students if they get stuck while reading. Students who can read but hesitate will be given more opportunities for public speaking or story cards to read out loud. Students making mistakes in pronunciation or are unable to identify punctuation marks will be encouraged to participate in the morning assembly to improve their abilities.The director instructed officials to complete subject-teacher mapping for the exercise by May 1 to facilitate seamless execution of the assessment process, warning that “failure to do so will render the ORF Module unusable.” The concerned panchayat education officer or urban cluster elementary education officer will be responsible if the mapping is not completed on time.
