The end-year-of-the-year examinations are over and students are receiving their results back. Whether students have scored well or not as well as they would have liked, this is a good time for students to pause and evaluate the areas they need to work on for the next academic year.
How can parents help their children? At the end of every test, whether it is a Non-Weighted Assessment or a Weighted Assessment, we ask our students to show us their papers so that we analyse the areas that they need to improve on. Here are some ways that the teachers at TF help their students and parents can do the same at home.
Level of difficulty of the paper set by the school & how the paper was marked
The only standardised testing that primary school students take is the PSLE. The rest of the tests and examinations they sit for, are set by the school teachers themselves. The level of difficulty of the paper will therefore range from relatively easy to fair and challenging. How challenging the paper is, will solely depend on the objectives of the English teachers, and school principal.
Just because a school is considered a ‘top school’ does not mean that papers are always set in a challenging way. I have seen very challenging papers from ‘neighbourhood’ schools. In the same way, the same school may set a paper 2 for a Weighted assessment ‘fair’ while SA2 paper 2 may be ‘challenging’.
This is the same for marking. Some schools accept a wide range of answers for a Comprehension Cloze and do not penalise for grammar or spelling mistakes in Comprehension OE. Another school may only accept the exact answer for a comprehension OE question and give a zero mark for anything else that may be correct but phrased differently.
For the above reason, our teachers always ask students to show us their papers so that we can analyse the level of difficulty and the strictness in marking. If a paper is set relatively easy and our student scores well, we congratulate them first before reminding them that the paper was easy and they should not be complacent for future tests. If a paper is set to be more challenging, we will encourage our students and remind them not to feel disheartened but tell them what they should work on more.
Some school teachers tell their students straight out that the paper was challenging and that the teachers marked it strictly. Show the paper to your child’s tutors or ask the class teacher her view on the level of difficulty of the paper.
Analyse the mistakes
While marks are important, analysing a student’s strengths and weaker areas is even more important. For example, a student who does not love writing compositions and may write mediocre compositions in class, can perform very well in an examination. This is the perfect opportunity for us as TF teachers, to praise the student and encourage him or her to continue on this path the following year. Over the years, I have had many students who received a boost of confidence from a good composition score in an examination and suddenly discovered a passion for writing, churning out great compositions from then on.
In the same way, if a student does badly for a component, we can analyse the areas that the student needs to work on. Is he or she having difficulty memorising the grammar and synthesis & transformation rules? Is the student having difficulty answering Cause and Effect questions in the comprehension OE section? Or is the student not employing the techniques taught in class accurately during examinations?
Even the Oral feedback form is valued at TF. Many times my students score well in the Reading section when tested by us but then stumble over words or misread them during the Oral examination due to being nervous.
Mistakes are always made but what we do with them after will be even more important. Analyse the mistakes and then work out a plan to improve on those mistakes.
Steps to improve on the areas of weakness
When the areas of weakness in the English paper have been studied, steps need to be taken to work on those areas, regardless of the level of difficulty of the paper and the strictness in marking.
There are many ways to improve on English components. At TF, we employ different ways to help our students, especially in their P6 year. With the parents’ approval, some students will need to do additional practices in those components for homework. Others will need to be more diligent in following the techniques taught in class. Those who have difficulty retaining Grammar or S&T rules will have to revise those rules more often at home. Those who have a weaker vocabulary bank, will need to read newspaper articles more often to help them in the Comprehension Cloze sections.
With the end of the SA1, the end-of-the-year examination is the only examination when students sit for a full English paper and all the components are tested. This is an excellent opportunity for a student to see for herself or himself, how they are performing, and what they need to do to help themselves. While marks may be disappointing for some students, (and worrying for parents, especially in the P5 year), we always remind our students to seize this opportunity to set goals and organise their ideas on how they plan to improve the following academic year.
Lastly, nothing is set in stone. A student who scores AL5 for his or her P5 SA2 English can score AL1 or AL2 for PSLE English. We have seen this countless of times at TF so do not give up. Remain positive but be proactive :)