New Delhi, Sept 25 (INB) The NCERT on Friday clarified that its recently released school syllabus was only a draft and said the final syllabus, based on feedback from teachers, students and educators, will be released in October. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) said school curriculum under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 should be understood through curricular goals, competencies and learning outcomes, rather than merely by counting textbook chapters. Clarifying concerns over the Grade 9 mathematics draft syllabus, NCERT said in a statement no overall topics had been dropped. Some topics, however, had been incorporated into other chapters instead of being presented as standalone chapters, it said. For instance, key ideas and applications related to Lines and Angles have been incorporated into chapters on “Propositions and Their Converses” and “Quadrilaterals” in Grade 9 Part 2, while concepts from Euclidean geometry are covered across several chapters, according to NCERT. The council said the decision not to have a traditional standalone chapter based on abstract axiom-theorem-proof treatment of Euclidean geometry followed consultations and feedback from teachers and educators. Instead, students would explore core concepts and their applications across different chapters, it said. NCERT also said a chapter on algorithms was included in Grade 9 mathematics to help students understand mathematical concepts related to algorithms, data structures and running-time efficiency, which it described as increasingly important with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. The addition was also aligned with the NEP 2020 mandate on computational thinking, while a separate standalone module on AI is being developed, it stated. Its new textbooks, including Mathematics and Social Science, have been designed to help students achieve curricular goals, competencies and learning outcomes through integrated and experiential learning, it added. It advised schools, teachers and boards to plan classroom teaching and assessment with reference to competencies, saying that judging curriculum coverage solely by comparing the number of textbook chapter headings with syllabus entries does not reflect the intent of competency-based education.
