Raising Learning Outcomes in Diverse Indian Contexts

This policy brief shows that improving learning outcomes in diverse Indian contexts requires a rethinking of educational strategies. While improvements in physical access to schools are welcome, improving learning outcomes requires different stakeholders to strengthen their role and adapt teaching content and methods to local contexts. The paper highlights the key messages and policy implications from seven projects from the ESRC-DFID Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems Research Programme. The research evidence provides valuable new insights to inform the Indian government’s efforts to ensure that all children benefit from quality education.ESRC-DFI

Chapter 12 Social distance, teachers’ beliefs and teaching practices in a context of social disadvantage

"This chapter analyses the widening inequalities within the government primary schooling systems in India and Pakistan and the implications of the emerging social distance between teachers and students. Social distance is a significant factor impacting student–teacher interaction in classrooms. How, and to what extent, does social distance shape teachers’ beliefs and practices? What is the likely effect of social distance on the education or learning of children from disadvantaged backgrounds? Using teacher interviews and classroom observation data, the chapter describes teachers’ beliefs and observed teacher–student interaction for high- and low-performing children. The empirical analysis is grounded in a conceptual frame linking teachers’ beliefs, practices and learning outcomes. Most teachers included in the study believe family background is the most significant determinant of learning. Teachers’ conceptualisation of a good student comprises a set of characteristics that are much more likely to be present in children from families where parents are educated and in stable economic circumstances or naturally gifted children. Teachers tend to favour the good students and can rarely adapt practice to help remove disadvantages for low-performing children or those from marginalized backgrounds. As a result, government schools are sites for the social reproduction of inequalities.

Public expenditure on education in India: recent trends and outcomes

It is widely accepted that there is an acute shortage of resources in the education sector in India. Economic reforms and associated requirements of fiscal discipline have aggravated the situation. By contrast, however, official sources claim that significant progress has been made in financing education. This paper examines whether, and in what ways, this is so. It analyses major trends in public financing of education in India, including expenditures by the central government, state governments, other local bodies and the NGO sector. Foreign aid, which is transferred primarily through central government budgets, is also included. The paper examines the level and composition of public expenditure on education and the mechanisms of resource sharing, allocation and utilization, in aggregate as well as separately for the centre and the states. It finds that while expenditure in real terms increased during the 1990s it has stagnated since then. As a proportion of GDP the share of public expenditure on education has been less than 4 per cent. But there have been major changes in the composition and modalities of expenditure. Initially, education was the responsibility of individual states, but in 1976 it became the joint responsibility of both central and state governments. The analysis finds that the centre has been playing an increasingly important role in state education finance. Centrally sponsored schemes, which are partly funded by external aid, have been a critical part of centre-to-state transfers. Expenditure trends in seven states are studied to explore the possible impact of expenditure on education outcomes. It indicates that for the less developed states recent changes in education expenditure have improved access, but retention and learning achievements remain very low

The impact of aid on education policy in India

In the early 1990s, large numbers of children in India remained out of school. International commitments to achieve education for all (EFA) globally meant that India was an important case for donors. India was pressed to accept aid for primary education, and agreed with some reluctance. Although subsequent donor involvement was substantial and influenced aspects of both policy implementation and management, it is shown that Indian education policy priorities remained self-determined. The government of India – though falling short of securing universal education for its children - succeeded in using external resources and expertise in ways which suited its own purposes, whilst minimising external impact on policy development. The politics and economics of this process are discussed

Estimating the Number of Out-of-School Children: Methodological Problems and Alternative Approaches - India Case Study

RLOsThis paper is a follow-up of the India Report on Out-of-School Children (United Nations Children’s Fund and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, August 2014). The India Report was useful especially because it highlighted data quality and data contradictions among existing data sources on education. This paper used the same framework to examine several sources of education data from 2005, and the proportion of children in the 6 to 13-years age group who were out-of-school.ESRC-DFI

The effect of long-range forces on cold-atomic interaction: Ps-H system

The s-wave elastic phase-shifts and s-wave elastic cross sections are studied to find the effect of long-range forces on cold-atomic interactions using a modified static-exchange model for Ps-H system. A Feshbach resonance in the triplet channel using the modified static-exchange model at the energy ~ 3x10^{-6} eV caused by long-range forces in the Ps-H system is being reported.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

Perfect transfer of arbitrary continuous variable states across optical waveguide lattices

We demonstrate that perfect state transfer can be achieved in an optical waveguide lattice governed by a Hamiltonian with modulated nearest-neighbor couplings. In particular, we report the condition that the evolution Hamiltonian should satisfy in order to achieve perfect transfer of any continuous variable input state. The states that can be transmitted need not have any specific properties - they may be pure or mixed, Gaussian or non-Gaussian in character, and comprise an arbitrary number of modes. We illustrate that the proposed protocol is scalable to two- and three-dimensional waveguide geometries. With the help of local phase gates on all the modes, our results can also be applied to realize a SWAP gate between mirror-symmetric modes about the centre of the waveguide setup.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Gravitational waves from spinning compact binaries in hyperbolic orbits

Compact binaries in hyperbolic orbits are plausible gravitational wave (GW) sources for the upcoming and planned GW observatories. We develop an efficient prescription to compute post-Newtonian (PN) accurate ready-to-use GW polarization states for spinning compact binaries, influenced by the dominant order spin-orbit interactions, in hyperbolic orbits. This is achieved by invoking the 1.5PN accurate quasi-Keplerian parameterization for the radial sector of the orbital dynamics. We probe the influences of spins and gravitational radiation reaction on $h_+$ and $h_{\times}$ during the hyperbolic passage. It turns out that both polarization states exhibit the memory effect for GWs from spinning compact binaries in hyperbolic orbits. In contrast, only cross polarization state exhibits the memory effect for GWs from non-spinning compact binaries. Additionally, we compute 1PN accurate amplitude corrected GW polarization states for hyperbolic non-spinning compact binaries in a fully parametric manner and perform initial comparisons with the existing waveforms.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review

The remains of a spinning, hyperbolic encounter

We review a recently proposed approach to construct gravitational wave (GW) polarization states of unbound spinning compact binaries. Through this rather simple method, we are able to include corrections due to the dominant order spin-orbit interactions, in the quadrupolar approximation and in a semi-analytic way. We invoke the 1.5 post-Newtonian (PN) accurate quasi-Keplerian parametrization for the radial part of the dynamics and impose its temporal evolution in the PN accurate polarization states equations. Further, we compute 1PN accurate amplitude corrections for the polarization states of non-spinning compact binaries on hyperbolic orbits. As an interesting application, we perform comparisons with previously available results for both the GW signals in the case of non-spinning binaries and the theoretical prediction for the amplitude of the memory effect on the metric after the hyperbolic passage.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings of the LISA Symposium X, University of Florida, Gainesville, May 18-23, 2014. To be published at the Journal of Physic