Motivate children regardless of exam results

WHATEVER the results — excellent or otherwise — parents must give their continuous supports to their children.

Results of public examinations are out. This is the time of the year when students, parents and even teachers are getting anxious.

Despite reminding ourselves that what is important is the learning process, we still look at the number of As scored.

Comparing the results of a child with another may bring more harm than good.

I truly support the recent call by the education minister to disallow announcement or celebration in schools or even in the media to highlight excellent results and making comparison of achievements between schools.

This is seen as a move forward in getting the community to start looking at students’ achievement and performance from a different perspective.

Hence, I am urging parents and the community to change their views and practice, particularly in relation to high-stakes examinations — “stop comparing” and “learn to acknowledge”.

Acknowledge that every child or student has his own zone of learning development.

Hence, we should stop comparing our child’s performance with other children as each child has different abilities, skills and talents.

They develop at a different pace. We should start nurturing ourselves to value the development of learning by looking at the students’ learning process and the level of progress rather than merely measuring or counting the number of As achieved from an examination.

As much as we want our children to do well in exams, we also need to remind ourselves and teach our children that there is always room for improvement whenever the outcomes or results did not meet initial expectations.

Avoid giving the children too much pressure that could lead them to depression.

Instead, we should always offer our hand to our children, inspire them to do better and give them moral support to move on and see things positively.

Reward and motivation should be inclusive. Not only those who excel will get rewards, but those underperforming students should also be rewarded and motivated to do better the next time.

Let’s reflect on how we could play our role as parents, teachers and society during this daunting moment — one thing for sure, we need to always be ready to support our children no matter what their examination results are.