CHENNAI: In what could put a dent in the image of students from India—one of the fastest growing nations, students of Tamil Nadu have been found to have the lowest literacy levels in reading, mathematics and science, according to assessments conducted across 74 emerging economies of the world in 2009, which covered 2.3 crore students of 15 years of age.The study, called the Programme for International Student Assessment, sampled students from, in some cases—small nations like Kyrgyzstan and Malta—countries as a whole, and in others—large countries such as India and China—select states or regions, which were considered as separate entities. From India, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were part of the study. It was observed that half of Tamil Nadu’s students do not possess basic standard in maths, 43 per cent cannot perform basic science assessments and a whopping 80 per cent have very low reading proficiency. Himachal fares equally badly in reading. In TN alone, 6,73,968 students of 158 government, government-aided and private schools were surveyed by Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for the study. In the reading scale of all 74 economies, Shanghai-China ranked first, whereas TN and HP placed on the bottom of the list—second and third from below, and Kyrgyzstan one spot above that. Nearly one-fourth of TN’s students could not integrate and interpret what they had read, while 14.2 per cent showed lower-than-basic ability to reflect on and evaluate what they had read.As for maths, 55.6 per cent of TN students “underperformed” even as per lowest assessment-levels. In science, TN placed 72nd, followed by Kyrgyzstan at 73rd place and HP right at the bottom.
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