CBSE, NCERT Develop 'Tamanna' Aptitude Test For School Students

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi, have developed 'Tamanna' (which stands for Try And Measure Aptitude And Natural Abilities), an Aptitude Test for senior school students to enable the stakeholders know the aptitude of students of classes 9 and 10. 

As a collaborative work, according to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India, under its aegis this test module has been developed, piloting of the aptitude test was done by the CBSE with 17,000 students studying in classes 9 and 10 through its affiliated schools across different parts of the country.

Students, teachers and parents must keep in mind that the aptitude test provides information related to the strengths of students and there is no pass or fail in this test, the MHRD says.

The test should be taken voluntarily by interested students and must not be used to impose any subject, courses of study or vocations etc. on the students, the ministry says.

"Each student is unique and differs from another. Students vary in terms of their physical characteristics such as height, weight, strength as well as in their psychological attributes like intelligence, aptitude, interest, and personality," HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal 'Nishank' said in a document accompanying the module. 

"While, one may be outspoken another may be submissive, some may be creative and flexible while others may be precise and specific, some may excel in expressing their views while some others may do well in reasoning with numbers. It is these variations which makes each student unique and sets the base for their behavioural differences in different situations," he added.

According the document, the CBSE and NCERT followed a very rigorous procedure for the construction of this aptitude test. 

Items were developed for seven identified sub-tests i.e. Language Aptitude (LA), Abstract Reasoning (AR), Verbal Reasoning (VR), Mechanical Reasoning (MR), Numerical Aptitude (NA), Spatial Aptitude (SA) and Perceptual Aptitude (PA) along with Technical Manual which gives the details of construction and standardization of the rest, Test Booklet which contains items related to the seven dimensions measured and Guide for Teachers and Parents which consists of the features of the aptitude test, administration and scoring and understanding the meaning of the scores. 

To make this appropriate to the Indian context, norms were developed based on data collected from 5491 students tested at 11 different locations in different regions of the country, the document said. 

School Principals can download the soft copy (PDF) of the Test Booklet and Manual from the official websites of the CBSE and NCERT.

Check more details on Tamanna here

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