Experiential versus Traditional Pedagogy: A study of primary school in Delhi NCR

Abstract

The Indian education system has been struggling with forming a foundational sense of numeracy among children. The draft of the Indian National Education Policy (NEP) that was released in early June 2019 makes a very clear statement about the "severe learning crisis." The long policy document states that there are a significant number of children in elementary school who don't have the basic reading and math skills and recommends a "pedagogical shift" to change this. Therefore, the research will focus on understanding whether a pedagogical shift from traditional pedagogy to experiential pedagogy will lead to better learning outcomes among primary school students. Using a pre- and post-test, we divided forty students (n = 40) from grade one into two groups. The first group experienced traditional pedagogy, while the second group experienced experiential pedagogy. Using SPSS 19, a t-test was administered. The result indicates students in experiential learning have better pre-test scores than students in traditional learning. The outcome stipulates that experiential learning provides holistic learning with better understanding that students can connect to their lives