WizKlub, an ed-tech startup in future skills for school children, has released key findings from their recently concluded HOTS Olympiad competition—that assessed the cognitive ability of children between age 6 to 16 years.
The result of this 6-month long competition for Indian participants on three key parameters was:
- Performance in the Comprehension and Critical Thinking section was below global average.
- Participants scored really well on the Logical Thinking section and were on an average one stanine (a method of scaling test scores on a nine-point standard scale with a mean of five and a standard deviation of two) better than the global averages.
- Problem-solving score was at par with the global averages.
The score in the Comprehension and Critical Thinking section is a reflection of the learning style of the child, predominantly learn by “Rote Memorization” tend to have a low score in this section. Students with a high score in this section learn the smart way and demonstrate the ability to understand concepts and central thought when faced with new information, make inferences, establish relationships, and make connections between new information with existing one.
The score in the Logical thinking section measures a child’s ability to detect the underlying conceptual relationship among visual objects and use reasoning to identify and apply rules. Identification and application of conceptual relationships requires inductive and quantitative reasoning, broad visual intelligence, simultaneous processing, and abstract and logical thinking.
The Problem-solving section assesses the “problem solving” ability of the child which includes the ability to define problems, identify useful information, represent the problem in terms of known concepts, plan a solution and evaluate whether the planned solution is moving towards solving the problem or not. Students with high problem-solving proficiency, can solve NEW problems easily, i.e., they are able to solve a problem irrespective of whether they have practiced it before or not.
Amit Bansal, Founder & CEO, WizKlub, said, “Most Indian parents don’t even know how their children are developing extremely important skills like Logical Thinking, Critical Thinking and Complex Problem Solving. Most competitive exams for admissions to good universities are based on application of these skills and not subject knowledge. These skills can be easily built in early years through structured programs.”
Some other interesting observations among Top Percentile Scorers were:
- Though the total number of students in Top Percentile was higher from Tier 1 cities (66% from Tier 1 cities and 34% from the rest), the Top Ranking positions were grabbed more by the Tier 2 City Students (55% from Tier 2/3 cities compared to 45% from Tier 1 cities)
- Specific to regions, students from the South zone of India outperformed other regions by almost 20%. The average score of students from the South zone is also a few percentage points higher than the national average.
- There is a slight gap between boys and girls wherein 59% of the top scorers are boys and 41% are girls.
HOTS Olympiad 2.0 has already started and will go on for the next 6 months. For more details, click here: https://wizklub.com/programs/hots-olympiad/
