TS TET Paper 1 key terms

A school-based assessment system that evaluates learners throughout the teaching period, not only at term end, and covers both scholastic areas such as subjects and co-scholastic areas such as attitudes, values, health and life skills.

Vygotsky's term for the gap between what a child can do independently and what the child can achieve with guidance from a more capable adult or peer. Teaching is most effective when pitched inside this gap.

Temporary support a teacher or peer provides while a learner attempts a new task, given as hints, models, prompts or partly worked solutions, and gradually withdrawn as the child gains competence and independence.

Piaget's term for the understanding that quantity, mass, length or number remains unchanged when only the arrangement or appearance alters, provided nothing is added or removed. It is typically mastered during the concrete operational stage.

Piaget's description of a young child's difficulty in taking another person's viewpoint; the child assumes that others see, know and feel exactly what he or she does. It is most prominent in the preoperational stage.

Piaget's third stage, covering roughly ages seven to eleven, when children reason logically about concrete objects and events but struggle with abstract or hypothetical ideas. Classification, seriation and conservation develop during this stage.

An approach in which children with disabilities and other diverse learners study in ordinary neighbourhood schools alongside their peers, while the school adapts its curriculum, teaching methods, materials and assessment to accommodate them.

A persistent difficulty in one or more specific academic areas such as reading, writing or arithmetic, occurring in a child of average intelligence without sensory, emotional or economic deprivation as the cause. Dyslexia is a common example.

The drive to learn that arises from within the learner, such as curiosity, interest, enjoyment or a sense of satisfaction, rather than from marks, prizes or fear of punishment. It usually sustains learning longer than external rewards.

Vygotsky's view that knowledge is constructed through social interaction, language and cultural tools; learners build understanding by discussing, questioning and solving problems jointly with teachers and peers rather than by receiving facts passively.

Assessment carried out during teaching to discover what learners understand and where they are stuck, so that instruction and feedback can be adjusted immediately. Its purpose is improvement, not grading or ranking.

Gardner's proposal that intelligence is not a single fixed score but a set of relatively independent abilities, including linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic intelligences.

In Telugu and Sanskrit, the sound change that occurs when two words or morphemes join, often a final vowel merging with an initial vowel. Knowing sandhi rules helps children read, spell and split long written words correctly.

A compound word formed by joining two or more words into a single unit that carries one combined meaning, very common in Telugu. Learning to split samasas helps children decode long words and comprehend text.

The principle that the languages a child already speaks are assets for learning rather than obstacles, so the home language is used to bridge understanding and to introduce the school language in early classes.

The four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening and speaking are oral, reading and writing are written; listening and reading are receptive while speaking and writing are productive. Oral work normally precedes reading and writing in early classes.

A method of teaching early reading that links letters and letter groups to the sounds they represent, so children decode unfamiliar words by blending sounds instead of memorising each word as a whole picture.

Two fast reading strategies: skimming means reading quickly to grasp the general idea or gist of a text, while scanning means searching the text for one specific fact, name or number without reading everything.

Reading large amounts of easy, self-chosen material for pleasure and fluency, with little or no follow-up testing. It builds vocabulary, speed and confidence rather than close analysis of a single text.

An approach that organises language lessons around real communication and purposeful tasks, so learners use the target language to give information, negotiate meaning and express feelings instead of only memorising grammar rules.

Krashen's distinction: acquisition is the unconscious, natural picking up of a language through meaningful exposure and use, while learning is the conscious, rule-based study of a language with correction, typical of formal classrooms.

The systematic study of learners' mistakes to decide which are developmental and rule-governed and which arise from mother-tongue interference, so that teaching can target the underlying confusion rather than only correcting surface forms.

The value a digit carries because of its position in a numeral: in 3,047 the 3 means three thousand, the 4 means forty and the 7 means seven. It underpins all written calculation and regrouping.

The instant recognition of how many objects are in a small group, usually up to four or five, without counting them one by one. It is an early foundation of number sense and mental arithmetic.

An intuitive grasp of numbers, their size, order and relationships, and how operations change them, which lets a learner compare quantities, estimate results and judge whether a written answer is reasonable.

A teaching sequence that moves from handling real objects, to drawings and diagrams, to written symbols and rules, so that abstract mathematics is built on physical experience before procedures are practised.

Any physical object such as counters, beads, sticks, blocks or fraction strips that children handle to model mathematical ideas, making concepts like place value, grouping or fractions visible and touchable.

Finding an approximate answer or size by rounding, using benchmarks or reasoning about quantities when an exact count is unnecessary, and using the same skill to check whether a calculated answer is sensible.

A stable, plausible but incorrect idea a learner holds, such as believing multiplication always makes a number bigger, which survives ordinary teaching unless it is directly elicited, confronted and replaced.

A way of presenting data using pictures or symbols, where each symbol stands for a fixed number of items. It introduces young children to collecting, recording and interpreting information before formal graphs.

The skill of using the senses and simple tools to notice and record details of objects, plants, animals, weather or events systematically, forming the starting point of inquiry in environmental studies.

A feature or behaviour of a plant or animal that improves its survival in a particular habitat, such as the camel's hump storing fat, cactus spines reducing water loss, or mangrove roots anchoring in marshy soil.

The sequence through which energy passes from one living thing to another, beginning with green plants that make their own food and continuing through herbivores to carnivores and finally to decomposers.

The continuous movement of water between the earth's surface and the atmosphere through evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection, driven mainly by the sun's heat and gravity.

A diet supplying all the nutrients a child needs, namely carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, fibre and water, in the right proportions for growth, energy, immunity and overall health.

Natural resources such as sunlight, wind, flowing water and biomass that natural processes replenish within a human lifetime, so they can be used repeatedly if not consumed faster than they are replaced.

A simple drawing that shows the relative positions of roads, buildings, fields or landmarks as seen from above, without being drawn to scale. It builds children's spatial sense of their own locality.