In conjuction with the release of the Government Transformation Project Annual report, the Star today reported:
The Malaysian education system is on track to becoming among the world’s best as stringent monitoring is in place to ensure its success under the Government Transformation Plan (GTP).
“The rate of improvement of the system in the last 15 years is among the fastest in the world,” the GTP report said.
Malaysia also ranks among the top in the world for equitable access to education.
As I read more about the sad state of affairs of Science Education in Malaysia, I can see glaring areas for improvement, and some areas that surprise me. All of this data is readily available in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that is actually a benchmark our very own Malaysian Government uses to gauge the success of the National Education blueprint. It’s a wonder that while me make it priority to score in the top third of this benchmark, no one for either side of the political divide seems to bother to read the report–merely taking the final score and politicizing it.
If they actually took time off to read even the one report for science–albeit the 520+ page long report. They’d find some rather interesting data.
Take for instance the controversial topic of Homework. There’s a huge Malaysian inclination to load our children with homework, with the noble aim to familiarize themselves with the subject matter and hence improve their test scores.In fact, in all countries surveyed by the TIMSS study, Malaysian students are given the most homework. The MOST!!
Yet we score in the bottom third of the study. Too much homework is bad, but just how much is too much?
The actual data from the TIMSS study, suggest that the optimal amount of science homework to give a child should be no more than 45 minutes per week per subject. You heard that right–in fact, across all the countries in the study, anything more than this and the test scores start to DECREASE.