NAS is a national-level large scale assessment study conducted to provide information about the learning achievement of students studying in government, government-aided and private unaided schools. NAS is a standardized method to tests students of Classes III, V, VIII and X. NAS has contributed several new elements and given remarkable momentum to the development of competency based assessment. One of the main virtues of NAS is that it is embedded in an extremely rich system of background variables. The results help to accurately discover the students’ performance in different learning outcomes vis-à-vis the contextual variables. The very aim of this national assessment is to compare the performance across spectrum and across population in order to find the desirable direction for the changes and provide a basis for the necessary decisions. The synthesis of the results of the national level provides a rich repository of evidences for developing and designing the future course of action for the Indian education system.
This NAS report presents the findings of national achievement survey conducted on students studying in Class III, V VIII and X. Selecting a representative sample in India is a challenging and arduous task. For selecting the representative sample of NAS, government, government aided, and private unaided schools were included in the sample frame. School level samples from each district were drawn for NAS conducted in November 2021 which was administered in 720 Districts of 36 States and UTs. Nearly 3.4 million students were tested in the learning outcomes developed by the NCERT. NAS is led by the NAS Cell, National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), under the aegis of Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL), Ministry of Education (MoE).