Beating new paths in education

Just how the British talk about their capricious weather, Malaysians talk about our wonderful food and how the country’s education system is outdated and needs a change.

There has been a lot of talk about change this past year, and with all the advocacy out there, parents and students are already aware that a more well-rounded education system is what the country needs.

The best bet to bring about this change is the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025. The Blueprint plans to increase the quality of education delivered to Malaysian children, and bring equity to the system in terms of access.

What needs to change

The current education system is exam-oriented. This means that everything the student and teacher do in the classroom is focused on getting the student to score above a certain mark in a single end-of-year examination.

While this method of assessment has been the norm for decades – even centuries in certain countries – modern educationalists and academics see it as being inadequate in actually imparting an education. Scoring a certain mark may mean that the student has the knowledge of the bare facts, but it certainly does not mean that there is any understanding of the facts, knowledge of their application, nor effect on the student, society, or modern life.

This makes the system closed off from the real world; a high score is no indication that the student will also succeed in higher education, secure a good job, or even forge a career.

Understanding and the ability to apply knowledge, especially in lateral thinking, has never been more desired in today’s globalised world where bare knowledge is easily available to anyone through the Internet. They are seen as almost essential to success in career and consequently in life.

So what is needed is a more contemporary and comprehensive system that shifts focus away from acquiring knowledge for its own sake and testing by way of regurgitation to real understanding and application of knowledge and an emphasis on the learning experience.

Tracks

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 report released in December last year revealed that Malaysian students scored better in mathematics compared to three years previously, but scores for science and reading had dropped.

PISA is a global assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) once every three years that tests 15-year-old students from 65 countries on their reading, mathematics and science abilities.

In this latest PISA report, though the average score recorded by Malaysian students for mathematics – 421 – was higher than the score of 404 recorded in the 2009 report, it is still below the 494 mean for countries within the OECD. Reading ability plunged from 496 to an average of 398 where the mean was 490, and the science score declined from 422 to 420 where the mean was 501.

Malaysia now has an overall ranking of 52 out of the 65 countries OECD countries tested by PISA – in the bottom third of the survey and lower than its regional neighbours.

The average person may think that these scores are surprising given the amounts of straight As scored by students in major exams every year. But as PISA testing questions specifically examine the levels of student literacy and critical thinking skills, it can be argued that this phenomenon proves the point that achieving high scores in the national examinations does not typically equal the existence of understanding and the ability to apply knowledge and think critically outside of familiar academic contexts.

Doing something about it

One of the aims of the blueprint is to put Malaysia in the top third tier of the PISA benchmark. The Education Ministry has stated that it hopes the country will show a significant improvement in the next report, due out next year, which would reflect educational reforms enacted under the Blueprint.

Moving up to the top section of the global ranking in such a short time will certainly be a monumental task. Already, LINUS (Literacy and Numeracy Screening) testing has been taking place to assess literacy and numeracy skills among Malaysia school students and PEMANDU, the Performance and Delivery Unit of the Prime Minister’s Department, has initiated several studies of various aspects of the education system as groundwork for the implementation of improvement and overhauling plans.

One of the most significant changes the blueprint plans to bring about is shifting the focus from the centralised national examination system to school-based assessments (PBS - Penilaian Berasaskan Sekolah). This new system has been designed so that PBS scores will be added to central examination scores at certain milestone years, and to replace the national third form PMR exams.

Last year saw the last cohort of third form students sit for the PMR exams; the new PBS-based third form exam, called Pentaksiran Berasaskan Sekolah Menengah Rendah, will start this year. The PBS will be factored into the UPSR level grades by 2016.

The PBS system will contain an increasingly higher percentage of questions that test higher-order thinking.

The plan is that by 2016, 80% of exam questions for the UPSR exam, 80% of questions for the From 3 central assessment, 75% of the questions for SPM core subjects, and 50% of questions for SPM elective subjects will be higher-order thinking questions.

The change in examination design is aimed at eliminating the need for content recall and the instances of teachers and students spotting questions in the centralised examinations.

Instead, students will have to be trained to think critically and to apply the knowledge they gain in the classroom in different settings.

New roads

As the requirements of the PBS system are quite different from the centralised examination system, there has been much speculation and questions about it from parents and teachers. Under the new system, teachers are basically required to be both educator and examiner.

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