Adopting practice-testing will lead to better learning outcomes

The Industry is growing at a rapid rate and education has become an essential element of the Indian economy too. The education system is ill-equipped to rise to the "digital" challenge as skill training a large pool of talent for the new era with the new technologies are still no longer in mass demand. The people still find it difficult to be in the system and ‘digitalisation’ is still being challenged.

With the ongoing megatrend, it is meant that education will have to be on top of the game, but on the other hand the outcomes of the studies are becoming poor and poor. What is the real problem here? According to the recent study by UNESCO, despite a 96% enrolment at the primary level, India’s education system fails to capitalise on providing quality education to these students. Learning outcomes are low and this exacerbates dropouts by the end of the lower secondary level, which is completed by only 50% students.

Reaching out to a large student population has been a constant problem. While the challenge of education access has been largely resolved, the issue of quality is not, particularly in the area of primary education. It has been much overlooked and obsolete, resulting in weak foundation among students. The results in workforce that is unemployable and hard to skill. The government is trying to solve it through regulation but that is unlikely to work. A massive unleashing of private, public, and technological forces is needed.

Robust platforms like Youth4work.com, with its tremendous technology will be needed to resolve the current problems found within the education sector. Furthermore, the platform has an extremely beneficial feature of “Practice Testing”- has been lauded by learning experts as one of the best ways to retain information. Two theories have been put forth as to why testing works: 1) testing enhances retention by triggering elaborative retrieval processes by accessing your long-term memory and retrieving associated information and 2) testing facilitates the encoding of more effective mediators via cues and targets. Additionally, recent evidence suggests that practice testing also improves the ability of students to mentally organize their knowledge, and thereby increasing the speed and efficiency of the information retrieval process.

Rachit Jain, CEO of Youth4work advises to “take as much as mock practice tests as you can. Platforms like Youth4work has launched dedicated apps for competitive exams by which you can practice either full exam or a section of any particular topic within the section at your convenience and improve your performance of speed and accuracy. Previous Years’ Papers, though the exam mode has changed from offline to online, the assessment areas of candidates have not. Hence practice not only previous years’ papers but also new question sets available in the market to get acquainted with as many question types as you can.”

How practice-testing affect studies:

Maintain Focus: You would be able to prepare for all the sections equally. Of course, you should play to your strength areas, but do not leave other sections behind.

Increase Speed: Better time management in distributing your time well between all sections. This can be done if you understand and improve the time you take to attempt each question. Youth4work.com’s technology manages the time for aspirants as for every question attempt, aspirants will get a time equal to average time of all previous aspirants’ attempts.

Improve Accuracy: With the application of learnt concepts, you need to keep improving your accuracy. Since the syllabus is huge, it is tough to cover all areas equally few days before the exam. It is, therefore, necessary to go through important areas once more, before the exam day. This will boost your confidence as well.

Waste No Time: During the day we end up spending quite some time eating, resting, bathing or just relaxing. When there is very little time left for an examination which might very well change the course of your career, it is crucial to not waste it. It might be hard, but highly beneficial if you can just fill the empty spaces of your next couple of days by memorizing important formulae, years, concepts, etc.

Build Confidence: Often, unsteady nerves won’t let you perform well despite a good preparation. Hence, it is very important to be confident and steady before your exam. If it is hard to calm down, just try a few breathing exercises. This will help you relax immensely and boost your exam day performance.