ASER OVER THE YEARS

ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) is the largest annual household survey carried out by citizens of India to understand whether children are enrolled in school and whether they are learning. Enrolment status is collected for children aged 3-16 and children aged 5-16 are tested on basic reading and arithmetic.

Coverage

In 2005, the ASER sampling design involved the selection of 20 villages in each rural district. In each village, 20 households were randomly sampled, for a total of 400 households per district.

Since 2006, the ASER sample size was increased to 30 villages per district. As before, 20 households were randomly sampled from each village, for a total of 600 households per district.

In 2005, 2007, and every year since 2009, ASER has also included a visit to one government primary school in each sampled village.

The total number of districts, villages, households, children and schools covered each year are summarized here. Note that these figures may not match those in the annual ASER reports as the latter report provisional totals only, reflecting coverage of those districts and villages from where data was received before the publication cut-off date.

Domains

Although the learning assessment in basic reading and arithmetic is at the core of the ASER survey, every year new domains and questions are added in order to explore different household characteristics that are thought to be related to children's learning. A summary of the domains covered by ASER is available here.

Detailed chart of questionnaires administered over the year                                                       

Learning assessment tasks

Over the years ASER has included a variety of learning assessment tasks in addition to the basic test of reading and arithmetic. These have included, for example, writing and comprehension tasks; reading and comprehension in English; and higher level tasks in arithmetic. A summary of learning assessment tasks is available here.