Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Why Is Tuition Not Helping Your Children In Their Studies

Writen by Alvin Poh Hee Kwang

Since I started working in the educational industry, I got many opportunities to talk to parents and to know about the various concerns parents have for their children in term of schools and education.

It is no surprise that many parents today (especially in Singapore) engage tutors to give their children tuition. In fact, I know of many children having private tuition for many years. And there are parents spending $200 to $400 each month just on tuition for their children.

That's a lot of money, isn't it? It is no surprise that the private tuition industry in Singapore is a million dollar business every year.

Having said that, many parents whom I have spoken to, very openly shared with me that their children's school results do not seem to improve in spite of the tuition.

In fact for some of them, their school results actually deteriorate as they move higher in the education system. These parents feel quite discouraged too. They really want to do something to help their children to improve; however other than engaging tutors for their children, they just don't know what else they can do. And ironically, tuition does not help them and they are spending so much money on it.

Personally I have nothing against tuition. On the contrary, I truly believe that tuition can be helpful for students who have a weak foundation in the subject. With the guidance from good tutors, these students can build their foundation and they can progress with more confidence and achieve better grades.

Having said that, why are so many children not doing well in their school despite having private tuition?

In fact, one parent told me recently that her son who is now in Secondary 4, has private tuition in Math since the beginning of Primary 3 - and that's a total of 7 years. And during these 7 years, the family has spent around $10,000 just on Math tuition alone. And the result is - his grade before the tuition is 51% while in Primary 3 and in last year's final year exams (i.e. in Secondary 3), her son's Math result is 59.5%. A mere of improvement of only 8.5% over the 7-year period!

There are a few possible reasons why students are not doing well despite having tuition at home. However there are two very important and common reasons to this issue but are unknown to many parents, teachers and students. They are:

1. Students are not aware of what they don't know

The beginning of true wisdom is to learn the art of knowing what you don't know. Exams result is simply a reflection of what we know and don't know about a specific subject. For example, if a student scores 40% for his math exams, what this means is that he has yet to understand 60% of his math work. The way to improve his grade is to know what are the things that he still doesn't know, and then look for ways to help him learn and understand those things. Once he can do that, he will be able to answer all the questions and hence improve his grade.

Unfortunately many students do not know what they don't know about the subject that they are learning. Hence regardless of how much time they spend studying for the subject or how much tuition they take, as long as their learning is not addressing the things that they don't know, they are not going to improve.

2. Students are not using the right learning techniques to help them learn the content

Attending lessons in school and going for tuition class have one thing in common. That is, students are learning the content of the subject. Although our students progress from one level to the next in the education system, majority of them are not taught the learning techniques to help them understand and absorb those content that the teachers and tutors expect them to learn.

Without the right learning techniques, no matter how much content we pile up on our children, they simply do not have ability to absorb them.

Most of our students only know one learning technique - rote learning i.e. learning by repetition. Rote learning is bad because using this method, students are simply memorising, but without much understanding. Hence that is why they are not able to store the information in their longer term memory that will help them do well in their exams.

The key to helping student to improve their school results is to first equip them with advanced learning techniques that not only help them commit the information into their long term memory, understand the concepts and able to recall the information from their sub-conscious mind whenever it is required. And these can only be achieved by making the learning process fun, enjoyable and easy for the brain.

Article by Alvin Poh, founder of Learning Champ, a parenting wesbite that provides information and resources to parents, who want to help their children develop the important skills and mind set for a brighter future -> http://www.learningchamp.com

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