Course: Elementary Education (8623) Semester: Autumn, 2022

Level: B.Ed (1.5 Year)

ASSIGNMENT No. 1

Elucidate the role of public and private sector in elementary education.

Discuss the initiatives of governement of pakistan in this context.

Remarks made at a seminar on Putting the Private Sector at the Core of Sustainable
Development Goals in Pakistan, organized by the FPCCI Standing Committee on
Research and Development, December 20, 2017

During the last quarter century or so, the private sector became a substantial
provider of education services in Pakistan. Data from various sources show the
total number of private schools (at all levels, pre-primary, primary, higher
secondary, technical and vocational and deeni madaris) began rising sharply in the
early 1990s, reached around 36000 in 1999-2000, and around 80000 by 2010 and
are currently at around 112000. By contrast, the total number of public schools
reached 153000 in 1999-2000 and currently stand at 190000. Roughly speaking,
since 2000, the number of private schools has been growing at the rate of more
than 10% per annum while the number of public schools has been growing at only
about 1.5 % per annum.

Similar trends apply with respect to the number of students enrolled. Private
schools increased enrolment from around 6 million students in 1999-2000 to about
20 million currently while public school enrolment rose from around 17 million in
1999-2000 to about 28 million currently.

Moreover, these changes have happened at a faster rate in the rural areas and in
small towns than in the urban areas and big cities.

Clearly, the private sector has been expanding access to schooling at a much faster
rate than the public sector in recent years. The available evidence suggests the
private sector will continue to provide the bulk of incremental enrolment and
access to basic education in Pakistan in the coming years.

How has this come about? And are there any downsides to this phenomenon of
private-sector led educational development in the country?

The main reason why private education supply has mushroomed in Pakistan in the
last quarter century is the growth in availability of cheap female labor for teaching
and administrative jobs, especially in small towns and rural areas. This labor force
is available at such low wages that it makes economic sense for private schools to
supply education at a cost low enough to attract low-income students. Where
previously it was not possible for the private sector to provide education services
profitably, the availability of pools of female labor in geographically segmented
markets has made it possible to do so. Female labor remains cheap because
females are, by local custom, confined to look for jobs within the villages and
small towns where they live. They cannot and do not migrate freely to where the
jobs pay better wages.

There is a downside to this market made possible by minimally-trained and low

wage female labor and that shows up in the quality of their output. The quality
provided by low-fee private schools is poor. However, these schools can survive in
a low-quality competitive equilibrium because government schools, while free to
attend, are no better and possibly worse in quality. Public schools are plagued by
teacher absenteeism and a lack of equipment and facilities to support decent
education. So low-income parents do not mind switching their kids to a low quality
private school because the alternative is worse.

Regarding education quality among public and private schools, earlier studies for
Pakistan had shown unclear results with some showing private schools to have
superior quality results but others showing only marginal differences. More recent
data, especially that produced by the ASER organization, show a distinctive quality
advantage among private schools. Private schools show better results than public
counterparts for English, Mathematics and local language comprehension among
Grade 5 students. Where private schools have been growing, quality outcomes are
also improving.

The promising potential seen for the private sector in basic education in Pakistan
cannot, however, be extended to the segment of higher education. Very briefly,
while private universities have been growing in number, the vast majority of them
are associated with low quality output. The Pakistan Education Statistics issue for
2015-16 show 163 universities in total, broadly balanced among 91 public and 72
private units. However, enrolment is heavily skewed in favor of public universities
with 1.14 million students in the public sector and only 214000 in the private
sector. And teaching resources are similarly skewed with 67000 teachers in the
public sector and only 17000 in private universities.

All this is consistent with a model of higher education where the private sector
only goes into selected disciplines, such as business and IT education, and avoids
spending the large outlays required for the establishment of science and
engineering universities or general-purpose universities with multiple departments
and degree programs. Higher education is not yet privately profitable in those types
of higher education institutions.

Describe in the light of Paget's theory the cognitive and intellectual

development of a child at different levels.

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that intelligence changes as

children grow. A child's cognitive development is not just about acquiring
knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world.

Cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate capacities and

environmental events, and children pass through a series of stages.

Piaget's theory of cognitive development proposes 4 stages of development.

 sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years

 preoperational stage: 2 to 7 years

 concrete operational stage: 7 to 11 years

 formal operational stage: ages 12 and up

The sequence of the stages is universal across cultures and follow the same
invariant (unchanging) order. All children go through the same stages in the same
order (but not all at the same rate).

How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was employed at the Binet Institute in the 1920s, where his job was to
develop French versions of questions on English intelligence tests. He became
intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the questions
that required logical thinking.

He believed that these incorrect answers revealed important differences between

the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget branched out on his own with a new set of assumptions about children’s
intelligence:

What Piaget wanted to do was not to measure how well children could count, spell
or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in
was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time,
quantity, causality, justice and so on emerged.

Piaget studied children from infancy to adolescence using naturalistic observation

of his own three babies and sometimes controlled observation too. From these he
wrote diary descriptions charting their development.

He also used clinical interviews and observations of older children who were able
to understand questions and hold conversations.

Piaget’s Four Stages

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through
four different stages of intellectual development which reflect the increasing
sophistication of children's thoughts.

Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and child development is
determined by biological maturation and interaction with the environment.

At each stage of development, the child’s thinking is qualitatively different from

the other stages, that is, each stage involves a different type of intelligence.

Stage Age Goal

Sensorimotor Birth to 18-24 months Object permanence

Preoperational 2 to 7 years old Symbolic thought

Concrete operational Ages 7 to 11 years Logical thought

Formal operational Adolescence to adulthood Scientific reasoning

Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at
which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the
later stages.

Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age - although
descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at which the
average child would reach each stage.
During this stage the infant lives in the present. It does not yet have a mental
picture of the world stored in its memory therefore it does not have a sense of
object permanence.

If it cannot see something then it does not exist. This is why you can hide a toy
from an infant, while it watches, but it will not search for the object once it has
gone out of sight.

The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an
object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental
representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.

'Personality development occurs early in life but later years provide an

opportunity for the modification of previously developed trends'. Discuss

Personality psychology is considered the study of individual differences in

behavior—how individuals behave differently from one another in various
situations. Developmental personality psychologists are interested in understanding
the ways individuals develop their unique patterns of responding to the
environment based on genetic endowments and social histories. Also of interest is
identifying the ways in which personality changes or is stable across development,
as well as identifying early behavioral precursors that are predictive of later
individual differences. From these multiple interests have come a number of
perspectives on personality development relevant to the age period spanning
infancy through adolescence (birth to twenty years of age).

Perspectives On Personality Development

Behavioral individuality in newborns is defined as temperament. A number of
competing models of temperament have been proposed, but most generally view
temperament as a construct that represents the early emerging, constitutionally
based, behavioral individuality that is consistent over both time and situations.
Conceptually, psychologists have differentiated infant temperament from
childhood and adolescent personality by noting that temperament represents the
more biologically based basic emotions, while personality represents the consistent
behavioral repertoire developed by an individual out of her interactions with the
social environment.

The course of personality development from temperamental beginnings has been

described by some as a transition from temperament to personality or as an
elaboration from basic dimensions of temperament to more complex dimensions of
personality. By late childhood and adolescence, this behavioral transition or
elaboration is apparent as behavior has become more purposefully directed and
increasingly incorporates concepts like self-understanding.

A number of theories have been developed that outline different interactional

processes of personality development, but most of the theories can be grouped into
two categories: those that emphasize certain developmental environments in
shaping an individual's personality and those that emphasize the individual's
biology. A theoretical orientation that emphasizes either the environment or
biology generally does not completely discount the position of the other, but rather
stresses one factor over the other with respect to relative importance.

Attachment

Many personality theorists and researchers emphasize the importance to early

personality development of the quality of attachment between infant and primary
caregiver. Attachment is considered the enduring emotional tie that an infant forms
with his caregiver, which helps to ensure a relationship style between caregiver and
infant that fosters infant survival. Several models characterize the developmental
progression of attachment formation. These models emphasize the universal,
biologically based process of attachment as it unfolds across infancy and
childhood.

Significant individual differences are not thought to occur in the actual process of
attachment formation itself, but individual differences do occur in the quality or
style of attachment. See Table 1 for a listing of the commonly agreed upon infant
and childhood attachment patterns and their characteristic behaviors. These
patterns of behavior have been identified through a laboratory procedure called the
Strange Situation, which was developed by Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues.
The Strange Situation is a standardized procedure that places the infant or young
child in increasingly stressful separation-reunion situations with the caregiver.

Many contributing factors lead to differences in attachment style, but the

developmental factor typically viewed as most important to attachment outcomes
is caregiver responsiveness to infant needs. For example, a caregiver facilitates a
secure attachment by consistently meeting the infant's needs. Infant needs may be
satisfied by behaviors such as responding to crying, feeding when hungry, physical
contact, and comforting during times of stress. If the infant's needs are met
consistently, a secure attachment is most likely formed through the infant learning
to expect the caregiver's responsiveness and dependability.

If an infant's needs are not met consistently, then one of the insecure attachment
patterns is more likely to develop. These insecure attachment patterns may lead to
later peer and romantic relational problems in adolescence and early adulthood.
Table 2 shows some adolescent and early-adulthood characteristics that researchers
have found to be related to different earlier attachment patterns. Table 2 includes
only the first three attachment styles listed in Table 1. Since the 1990s, researchers
have identified the fourth attachment style, insecure-disorganized-disoriented, and
have not studied the outcomes that might be associated with it.

Some research has revealed a relation between infant temperament and attachment
style. Infants classified as temperamentally difficult—characterized by irritability,
adverse reactions to changes in routine, and unpredictable endogenous rhythms,
like wake/sleep cycles, are more likely to form one of the insecure attachment
styles. This relation between temperament and attachment suggests that
temperament can influence the process of attachment. For instance, a
temperamentally difficult infant is in many ways more difficult and less satisfying
to care for than a more easygoing infant. The increased burden of caring for a
difficult infant makes it less likely that the infant's needs will be met as
consistently as those of the more temperamentally easygoing infant. These
relationship differences between caregivers and temperamentally different infants
stand to shape different attachment patterns.

Becoming increasingly popular in assessing the relative contributing factors in

early personality development is the concept of goodness-of-fit between the
developing infant or child and his or her environment. In the example above of the
temperamentally difficult infant being more likely to form an insecure attachment,
if the particular caregiver is not negatively affected by the difficult behaviors of the
infant, then an insecure attachment is less likely to occur because of the good fit
between the caregiver and infant. The goodness-of-fit between an infant or child
and her environment is as important in determining developmental outcomes as
different developmental factors (e.g., parental responsiveness, temperament)
considered separately.

Friendship

Another important environmental influence for personality development is peer

friendships. Research suggests that between 6 percent and 11 percent of school-age
children have no friends, and there is clear evidence that these children are at
increased risk for later social and emotional maladjustment. A lack of successful
childhood friendships is also related to academic difficulties and dropping out of
high school. The broad scope of childhood friendships as potentially a positive or
negative developmental influence for personality is understandable in light of the
amount of time children and adolescents spend with peers in both school and social
settings.

Friendships take on greater importance as children grow older, with friendships

accounting for an increasing amount of the child's time and experience. For young
children, friendships serve to increase excitement during play and allow
opportunities for the child to regulate his excitement. Maintaining friendships in
middle childhood (generally considered to be between the ages of six and twelve)
requires children to learn about behavioral norms and relate to others. And in
adolescents, friendships are particularly important as the typical adolescent begins
to rely on friendships for social support and as a resource for self-exploration. In
adolescents, friendships provide an important opportunity for social referencing,
which allows the adolescent to try on different social roles and ideals that are
essential to the development of a sense of self.

Self-Concept
Related to adolescent friendships and personality development is an aspect of
personality known as self-concept. Some personality theorists and researchers
contend that the developing and changing view a person holds of herself is an
important aspect of individual differences and is often neglected under the
temperament or trait conceptions of personality. From this perspective, a person's
self-concept (which incorporates such features as the individual's history, sense of
competency, and goals for the future) is an important behavioral determinant that is
more dynamic, malleable, and encompassing than temperament or personality
traits.

Explain the inter-relationship of language skills. How does the classroom

environment affect them?

Language is a cognitive process by which we communicate our thoughts and

feelings to others. When we think of language and school, most of us think about
reading. But language skills encompass more than reading. We talk, we listen, we
read, and we write with words. Language skills, then, include reading, writing,
listening, and speaking.

Reading, writing, speaking and listening play crucial roles in school, and all four
are interrelated and affect one another. There is a fundamental and reciprocal
relationship among oral language (listening and speaking), written language, and
reading. Initially, reading and writing are dependent on oral language skills.
Eventually, reading and writing extend oral language. Young children use oral
language skills to learn how to read. Older children use reading to broaden their
learning.
Reading. Of the four language skills, reading has the greatest impact on school
success. Substantial research in reading development and reading instruction has
been funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(NICHD) within the National Institutes of Health. Since 1965, well over 45,000
children and adults from all walks of life have participated in the research (Birsh,
2005). NICHD funded researchers have now defined how children learn to read,
why some children have difficulties learning to read, how we can remediate
reading difficulties, and how we can prevent reading difficulties.

In 1997, in response to a congressional charge, the National Reading Panel (NRP)

was created under the direction of the NICHD. The purpose of the NRP was to
conduct an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research on reading and its
implications for reading instruction. The panel examined over 100,000 research
studies completed since 1966. The panel’s report, issued in 2000, stated that, in
order to read, children must be taught alphabetics (phonemic awareness and
phonics), reading fluency (speed, accuracy, expression, and ease), and reading
comprehension.

The findings of the NRP report on the five components of reading instruction are
summarized as follows:

 Phoneme awareness –the ability to attend to, think about and work with the
individual sounds in words
 Phonics – the relationship between the sounds and written symbols of
language or phoneme-grapheme correspondence
 Fluency – the ability to read text quickly and accurately
  Vocabulary – the ability to understand the meanings of the words we use to
communicate
 Comprehension – the ability to derive meaning from what is read, which is
the reason for reading

Poor instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics is the most common reason
why students exhibit reading problems. The most common cause of reading
problems other than poor instruction is dyslexia. While learning to read may be
more difficult for children with dyslexia, students with dyslexia can learn to read
when they are taught in a direct, sequential and cumulative fashion.

Reading problems may also be caused by breakdowns in other components such as

fluency, vocabulary, and/or text comprehension. Deficits in vocabulary and text
comprehension are very often associated with oral language difficulties. Poor
comprehension of text may be due to challenges with attention and/or memory.
Because reading problems have various causes at their root, and because these
various causes are treated in different ways, it is critical to specifically identify and
address all of the underlying causes.

Writing is the expressive mode of written language and involves using written
symbols of language to communicate. Writing not only includes the ability to
accurately represent the graphic form of speech (letters and words) but also the
ability to develop and express one’s thoughts in a cohesive, structured manner. The
skills required for effective writing include knowledge of spelling, capitalization,
punctuation, and grammar, an understanding of how word order in sentences
affects meaning, and the ability to distinguish main ideas from supporting ideas or
details.
Listening involves understanding what we hear. To listen effectively, one must be
able to retain ―chunks‖ of language in short-term and working memory, recognize
and understand vocabulary, recognize the stress and rhythm patterns of speech and
glean meaning from context.

Speaking skills include the correct pronunciation of words, the appropriate use of
vocabulary and grammar and the ability to recall words from long-term memory.
The goal of speaking is to make our ideas and explanations clear and
understandable to others. Effective speaking also involves the ability to use
language within the social context.

Children who struggle with language often perform poorly in school because they
have trouble understanding what is said to them, what they read, and expressing
their thoughts to others. Students with language processing problems should
receive instruction or therapy by a qualified professional, as well as receiving
accommodations and modifications in the school setting, if necessary, to assure
school success.

Differentiate between role-play and simulation. Discuss the use of each for
making teaching learning process effective at elementary level?

Simulation and role-play are effective teaching methods that simplify learning for
students. Simulation refers to the method where an individual acts or imitates a
role in a play whereas role play refers to when an individual portrays a role in a
play. The simulation method of teaching refers to a model that represents a real
classroom but the learning takes place in a virtual atmosphere. It tests the
knowledge and skill levels of the participants by placing them in situations and
scenarios where they must solve problems actively. To create a safe environment,
the parameters are defined by the instructor to foster hands-on learning
experiences.

―Simulation is the process of designing a model of a real system and conducting

experiments with this model for the purpose of understanding the behavior (with
the limits imposed by a criterion or set of criteria) for the operation of the system‖.

Role play in the classroom refers to a method of instruction in which students are
asked to take the role of someone else in a given situation so that they can
understand the situation from a fresh perspective than they normally would. It is an
active method of learning and teaching.

Difference between Role-Play and Simulation Method of Teaching

SIMULATION METHOD ROLE PLAY METHOD

It is general and takes place in a group It is specific and each student has a
situation representative role

It is teacher-driven or computer-driven It is student-driven and spontaneous

and is premeditated

The events in this method could have The action in this method has a past
happened or can be hypothetical and the events have happened already

This method mimics real life and is In this method, the focus is on what
highly relatable and relevant will happen

This method is reflective where the This method focuses on problem-

learners have to reflect on what they solving as a problem is given and the
will do students have to determine how they
will fix it