While perusing Monday’s edition of L’Express, I came across two interesting news items.
Cambridge teaches us how to teach and learn
For a long time, we, Mauritians, have studied by “doing” past-papers. We do that at CPE level, SC level, at HSC level and, perhaps, at University level.
This is bad according to Cambridge International Examinations of the University of Cambridge. In this L’Express article , CIE says:
“[…] le recours massif aux questionnaires des éditions précédentes serait anti-pédagogique. Selon le MES et CIE, cette pratique inciterait à  apprendre par coeur au lieu de véritablement connaitre le sujet examiné.”
Now I understand why some University students still try (sorry, it’s not possible to do that at tertiary level…) to learn what we teach them by heart. Heck, some students try to learn C or Java programs by heart. It’s because that’s how they have (more or less) always learned.
We need to do something in Year I to address that. We need to introduce some kind of “How to learn and succeed at University” module!
Poor, poor Mrs Toorab
Another beautiful article caught my eye.
It is an article on this pathetic decision of the Ministry of Education to ask all primary teachers to use correction fluid (tippex, blanco, …) to “correct” prescribed books used by 5 years old kids where it is said that one Mrs Toorab is wearing a swimming suit.
The books are then supposed to be checked by the school master who has to send a report to the Ministry.
I don’t like this situation at all. Instead of focussing and wasting resources on such trivial issues, the Ministry should focus its energy to understand what CIE is telling us and how far we are from a good (I’m not saying perfect) education system and do something about it.
Mauritius is small. We don’t have oil or gold. We only have our brains. It’s a crime to destroy the creativity of thousands of little Mauritians every year with our poor education system. And it’s killing our economy too.
About the first photo
This is a photo of Stephen Hawking that I found in an article in National Geographic.
In the photo, he is having fun in a zero gravity plane (i.e. he is experiencing something that astronauts feel – weightlessness) even though he is almost completely paralyzed…
He is one of the greatest scientist and philosopher living today. I am a big big fan of him. I even have two of his books.
He is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
I suppose he didn’t study by “doing” Cambridge past-papers when he was younger :-)
PS: I’ll talk of AJAX in my next post :-)
Hello.
I think that what Cambridge has done is absolutely right. Past papers make us learn like parrots just to answer questions. They don’t make us think. We just learn to pass the tests – that’s all. We don’t seek to learn other things!
It’s going to be interesting to see what teachers would teach next year since all our system is based on past question papers. It’s going to be even worse for tuition teachers who take a lot of money and don’t work in schools where the Government pays them to work.
Will this mean that some teachers will as from now make an extensive database of past papers and give them to students (for some high prices perhaps)? And that the best teacher will have the best database? I fear that might be the case for our country.
At uni, I hope that the mentality of past papers will fade by itself, without the need to make restrict the availability of past papers. It’s a shame to see guys asking for past papers right from the first lecture.
Working a few past papers at the end of all lectures is not bad at all – it gives us a view of how the paper we’ll be having at the exams might be. But working past papers since the start is bad. Working examples from books would be far better. They start with easy questions and then become harder and harder – the right way to learn!
Concerning the Toorab family case:
It’s a real shame for the country. How can teachers say that such a thing is not reflecting the family’s practices in that community? Is that what teachers are supposed to teach – Since you belong to one community, you’re not allowed to do this or that or to wear this or that?
There are still people in this country who are living in the distant past, where globalisation has not yet taken place, where religion is still a major factor in education at schools.
Living in a laïque country is becomming difficult…
@ dilraj i think that the sale of past papers and manuals will stop instead i heard its freely available online..
didn’t dig into the subject though!
@Avinash
i believe that students learn by heart because of the way the papers are set..
Define… describe.. differentiate..
these types of question should prompt the student to answer in their own words but instead they give exactly what are available in lecture notes
A solution for learning by heart i think will be for lecturers not providing lecture notes right away.. And knowing that no lecture notes will be provided i believe their will be less sleepy and less people absent in our classes :P
say we work on a certain topic in week 1, Then the following week, a group of student will be ask to make a small presentation (about 30 mins) as if a summary of the previous week topic
(The group for the presentation should be selected on the day of the presentation, this way everyone will work out and do their research etc)
Ps: waiting for the next post :)
quote:
We need to do something in Year I to address that. We need to introduce some kind of “How to learn and succeed at University†module!
Indeed a very good idea.
Personally i attribute my success at HSC by practicing a lot of past papers starting from 1987 to June 2006. It has helped me a lot. I USED TO BUY THOSE PAPER AT MES Reduit also apart from those “banned” books which were previously available in the market.
But at Uni level, i have no idea how it gonna be. i once got an assignment on programming set by you personally and then i thought that at uni, its different…..
I think, when we’ll enter uni this year, an Orientation Programme concerning “how to study effectively” would be very helpful.
@curiousEngine
well i’ve worked lots of past papers too when i was in HSC but i also think if the questions,for the exams tend to repeat themselves year after year.. maybe if questions weren’t so much alike students wonldn’t have bothered about working that much pastpapers and eventually concentrating on the actual cool stuff about the subjects..
Well having a module “about how to study” i don’t think that its at university level that we should teach that.. these stuffs should be taught in secondary itself..
we are already complaining about the course being bulky and now bringing another module to it :S
As vicks said i think that the problem is the way the exam paper is set! and maybe the way the modules are taught!! we’re bout 1 week from the exam and i still havent found anyfin to learn by heart in the parallel processing module! maybe review some concepts and stuff but not really learn them by heart ( was planning to do that for some of the syntax, but since u said pseudocode is cool, guess wnt even do that…lol!!)
In retrospection i think that OS shud have been a bit of the same, understanding the concepts rather than learning definitions! I havent taken ur class this yr tho so maybe thats the case for the 2nd yrs this time around!
from experience i fink a possible solution would be having open book tests and exams! During my time in electrical engineering i had a couple of modules wiv Charlie and all his tests were open book. N tho we all brought books and loads of notes for the test, there wasnt even time to check anyfin! All the questions asked for some real finkin instead of just reacalling from memory. So if u didnot understand anyfin during the lectures, then the books were of no use during the test!!
Pascal grosset did the same fing for the VR module this yr. open book tests! and tho many students whined and moaned coz no question came out of the notes, i found it real cool coz it was about applying wat i learned. must say i got pretty gud marks as well :P
imho this is the way to go. we need to shift the focus from memorising to really understanding. as long as the system only tests the students ability to memorise loads of stuff to get good grades, then they r neva gonna put it the xtra effort to really understand thing. coz sadly rite now in most cases, u get a definition wrong u lose ur marks, understanding the concept aint really important!!
pity no 1 has thought of introducing open book exams at uom, now that wud be fun!!
The 21st century is about brainpower.
It requires different capabilities than the 20th, and American competitiveness is not something we can take for granted. We must realistically assess the state of our educational system and invest in its transformation.
The above quote is from Carly Fiorina the retired CEO of HP. Learning by heart or simulating responses from model answers surely do not increase one’s brain muscle…Uni studies or any education’s objective is open up one’s mind and horizon.
Even at a younger age a student should be taught learn how to learn…. With my limited resources and means I have conducted learn to learn training sessions based on the book “the learning revolution” by Gordon Dryden & Janette Vos, that has been well appreciated and most useful to the participants. A must book for all teachers.
Wonderful article….
I’ll be waiting for the next post on AJAX….and if possible something on ASP.NET v/s Ruby on Rails on another day…
Here’s one teacher’s reaction to the news about Cambridge past exam papers being removed from the market published in L’Express today:
http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article_sup.php?news_id=85996
He seems to be saying that it is in fact Cambridge’s fault as the exam questions are badly set: “As far as Mathematics is concerned, there are direct questions, which do not call upon the pupils’ capacity for reflection”…
As you indicated, the teacher said:
According to Bloom’s Taxonomy, here are the normal levels of abstraction that a student has to develop as he/she spends years in primary, secondary and tertiary level:
It seems that many students are trained up to level 3 (Application) only. More so, it seems that level 2 is mostly abstracted i.e. many students learn something by heart (level 1 – Knowledge) and apply that knowledge (level 3) without understanding it (level 2) first especially in secondary school.
Now, the teacher is saying that the culprit is Cambridge itself with exam papers that only ask for level 3 questions.
I’m not sure about this for two reasons:
My opinion is that Cambridge as a business entity does not care about giving us stupid exams to do. But some people there who are pedagogues by heart are trying to make things move in the right direction.
I suppose we need to help them somehow. I guess my students will agree that I’m trying to bring my little contribution to the whole process…
About the cambridge stuffs
I can’t not agree with that, because, if you dont practice something enough, you never get better at it (if not better, maybe quicker), with the amount of time provided for attempting all these questions, you need to have lots of work practice for all these questions.
Now, am not really a big fan of “doing home works”, but i never used to understand physics.. until 2 weeks before the exams i thought that i’ll work a few papers, atleast… in the exam i got saved from starting to derive everything from base then come to answer simple questions (like i did in my first pass at hsc).
Past papers are needed, but sure enough, i have seen ppl working past papers as if they are on drug, i never understood where they used to get the courage to work these out.. as ultimately.. in a perfect exams, previous questions asked must not be repeated after… but as you can see.. in many papers, old questions repeat over and over… the students have basically just found a flaw/open hole in cambridge papers and they have successfully exploited it to take advantage of it (they might be ultimately the one who will lose a lot, but cambridge reps is also scratched ..since if it becomes easier.. it lose its ‘magic’ for the mass)
Whether we like it or not..
Mrs Toorab
In 2007 religion interferring in government and education matters??
I have read that article some week ago, i thought it was funny that the government took such a step (though not surprised), what if the religious community of the new name that replaced “Mrs. Toorab” also didn’t like and wrote a letter? what if not religion accepted that? would there have been entries in the text book like:
“Last sunday the char *familly_name went to the seaside, Mrs char *mrs char *familly_name was wearing a nice blue char *cloth_type….”
Or maybe, we should have only this in that page:
A day at the seaside
Children,just imagine a day at the seaside with whoever and wherever you want and answer the following questions based form what you thought?
I almost forgot, i must write a letter to the ministry of education also, because i remember vaguely having read a primary student’s book where it was written “selven wore a flower pattern shirt”
I just hope that they’ll correct that :p, because selven doesn’t wear flower pattern shirt.
+$3|v3n
do you accept trackbacks?
anyways:
http://blog.nbnakama.com/ketwaroo/2007/05/18/trackback-to-listen-to-cambridge%e2%80%a6-on-meetoos-blog/
Hi, me again … just felt like adding a thought this string.
Rote learning is a favourite of Mauritians, even preached by teachers who profess high pass marks for their students.
This is the catch – all international education experts paid big money to come and evaluate/advise Mauritius on its education system ..deliver the same report. The curriculum is just too passive and rote learning is THE way to assess a ‘bright’ student who can recite a formula or a Shakespearean prose at the drop of the hat. And each time, the experts have asked the government to shake off the archaic system, it has shook the very foundation of political parties. Many politicians triggered ballistic effects as to trump the elections.
No, S Hawking did not do past papers. He is the outcome of the British Education system which has the record number of Nobel prize winners and gave the world its basket of inventors of the great industrial age.
Read Steven Pinker.