AI-enabled assessment and Personalized Adaptive Learning system for building 21st-century skills among students in government schools

Students in India’s public schools, especially those from low-income households, are entering a labor market where analytical thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning are increasingly essential. This shift is reflected in the WEF Future of Jobs Report (2025) and in India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which emphasizes experiential learning and higher-order skills. However, delivery infrastructure has not kept pace with policy intent. Public schooling remains optimized for rote instruction and exam completion. As a result, students receive limited opportunities to practice real-world problem solving, and teachers lack the tools to assess such skills reliably at scale. Most existing interventions face three structural barriers: 1. Teacher capacity constraints: Teachers manage large classrooms and exam-driven syllabi. Even when trained, they lack the time and tools to run, assess, and personalize projects for diverse learners. 2. Assessment and evidence gap: 21st-century skills appear in student-created artifacts, such as projects, drawings, explanations, code, or spoken reasoning. Current assessments are either manual (slow, inconsistent) or reduced to quizzes (poor proxies). Without scalable, reliable assessment, systems cannot track mastery or improve programs. 3. Lack of personalization: These skills develop unevenly and contextually. Without continuous measurement and adaptive support, instruction defaults to the “average learner,” leaving many students disengaged or behind.

The Apprentice Project (TAP) is a Section 8 nonprofit that enables underserved students in Grades 4–12 to build 21st-century skills—problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, STEM, and financial decision-making—through scalable, AI-enabled learning systems embedded within India’s public education system. TAP operates primarily through TAP Buddy, a WhatsApp-first Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) platform that delivers project-based learning, continuous assessment, and feedback at population scale. Students engage through short videos and hands-on tasks (coding projects, science models, budgeting plans, creative artefacts), submit work as images, text, or voice, and receive rubric-aligned feedback. Teachers and system actors are supported through dashboards and workflows that reduce manual grading and enable adoption within government systems. As of FY 2025–26, TAP works across Maharashtra, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Punjab through formal state, district, and municipal partnerships, reaching 100,000+ students and 1,500+ teachers directly. TAP’s model is aligned with NEP 2020’s emphasis on competency-based learning and formative assessment. With the Support of Meta-supported Pragati TAPcreated production-grade, multimodal AI systems (text, image, voice), with strong human-in-the-loop safeguards, auditability, and data governance suitable for use with minors and public systems. TAP is now converting core AI infrastructure—assessment engines, personalization logic, teacher workflows, and multilingual tooling—into Digital Public Goods, aligned with the objectives of the AI Impact Commons under the IndiaAI Mission.