What about the failures?

Soon after the results of a public examination are announced by the Department of Examinations, the euphoria created in the media about the students who scored the highest marks takes many forms. The approaches taken by the students to achieve success are published. Banks and other organizations offer scholarships to the high scorers. Parents attempt to transfer the brightest children to the so called ‘popular’ schools. Politicians rush to recognize the highest scorers at different functions arranged to felicitate them if they happen to be from their areas.

However, very scant attention is paid to the failures so that remedial action could be taken to reduce the number of such failures in the future. This article attempts to draw the attention of the parents, teachers and the education authorities to the roles they can play to achieve higher rates of successes in the future examinations - especially held for school children.

The results of most public examinations conducted to test the educational achievements of secondary school students indicate that over 40% of them fail (unable to achieve the qualifying marks for a pass).

If the successful and unsuccessful students have been learning in the same classes from the same teachers, what are the reasons for such a large number of failures? What can be done to help them perform better in future examinations? Answers to these questions can enhance the progress of our future generations.

Various types of research conducted by educationists in the recent past show that physical and mental deficiencies are not the only reasons that prevent students from high educational achievements. They postulate that the teachers and the educational authorities are responsible for this situation. If the teachers in schools and the educational counselors as well as the other supervisory staff attached to education offices carry out their responsibilities effectively, the number of failures could be reduced considerably.

Present day school children have to undergo many difficulties. Those who get enrolled in the so called ‘popular’ schools in Colombo and other urban centers have to travel long distances. Some of those who come to Colombo travel from places like Pasyala, Eheliyagoda, Ja-ela, and Bandaragama. They get up at about 3 am and travel even without any breakfast in crowded vans or buses for three to four hours each way. So, six hours of their time is spent on the road.

Most of these children suffer from ailments like catarrh that affect their lungs and are not outwardly visible. This may cause hearing defects in some of them. They never complain to their teachers when they cannot hear what the teachers say. They just keep on staring at the teacher as if they comprehend all that she says. When they cannot hear all or part of the lesson how can they absorb the essence of what has been taught?

Teachers have to ensure that all the children in a class hear what they say clearly. Some teachers - especially lady teachers - talk softly and only the students in the first few rows can hear. Others lose their attention and do whatever they want thus distracting themselves from the lesson (of course, without being noticed by the teacher). All teachers have to be given voice training before they are assigned any teaching activities.

Recent surveys have revealed that most of our school children suffer from malnutrition. Malnourished children have comprehension problems. Those who teach classes where malnourished children are found, have to use visual and kinesthetic approaches and learning aids to supplement their auditory skills to make their lessons comprehensible to all students in their classes. To make this a reality teachers in developed countries use lesson rubrics to plan and conduct effective lessons. They do continuous evaluation of their lessons to improve their lessons bearing in mind the variations in the learning skills of their students.

This is essential as the attention spans of the students as well as their learning styles differ. Variations in attention spans have to be considered in deciding on the speed of delivery of the lesson, speed of talking, voice modulation, use of learning aids including the black or white board, and the illustrations or examples presented at each lesson.

A few of the students — especially those in the front rows - may understand what the teacher says immediately. Some others may take their own notes and study them later for better comprehension, still others may prefer to learn by emulating the teacher as she explains concepts with illustrations on the black or white board. There may be others who want to experiment and test the concepts explained and apply them in real life situations. This variation in learning styles has to be considered in planning each lesson.

For some children, group learning sessions are the best, where they learn from their peers as well as the teacher. Group learning activities need greater attention and planning by the teacher. A whole series of such activities for the different subjects or grades can be downloaded from the internet. Some of them have been prepared by the staff of the National Institute of Education.

We still find some conscientious teachers who continuously evaluate the learning levels of their students and do remedial teaching for those who fall back. But most of the present day teachers do not have those competencies for monitoring and follow up. This has been an unfortunate effect of the ‘automatic promotion’ system that is adopted in our schools now.

Our teachers can be given ‘in-service’ training to use more effective active learning methods so that they can gradually move away from the passive method of ‘talking, talking’ the whole time. The In Service Assistants (ISAs) attached to zonal education offices can help in this matter.

The oral presentations can be supplemented by more active learning methods like demonstrations, role plays, educational games, studying real life models, simulations, model building, individual or group problem solving, projects, field visits, skits and drama and a whole array of learning methods that have been developed recently.

“If you know how to teach, you can teach anybody anything” is a saying among the educationists. So, it is not the misfortune of the students that they fail examinations.

Another aspect that has to be considered is creating awareness among students about the range of careers open to them. This is especially for the benefit of the inevitable dropouts of the system. Many secondary schools have such career counseling programmes. The Divisional Secretariats have staff who can go round the schools to conduct such programmes. They have been specially trained by the Department of Manpower and Employment of the Ministry of Labour and Trade Union Relations.

The roles of parents and pre-school teachers also are of critical importance in the development of learning skills in children. In the introduction to the publication entitled “Guidelines for Child Development Centres” issued by the Ministry of Child Development and Women’s Empowerment in collaboration with the UNICEF (2006) it is categorically stated that “The first five years of a child’s life is critical for brain development. It is critical not only because of the rapidity of brain development during this period but also because it is a period when brain development is most susceptible to external influences that determine the quality of intellectual functioning. The years from 3 to 5 are especially important for the achievement of key milestones in language acquisition, socialisation and personality development.

“What the pre-schools are expected to provide and need to provide is the enabling environment that includes quality childcare appropriate to a child’s state of development and address the needs of the child while respecting individual differences”

It is the duty of our education authorities, to initiate develop and implement awareness programmes and other activities for teachers and parents so that they can help school children to study effectively in order to reduce the number of failures at our public examinations and support national progress.