Saturday, July 30, 2011

Thinking about Thinking Questions...

I admit, in the system that I was familiar with, be it in my school days or in my earlier years of teaching (ok, back to my previous context), there were lots of emphasis in the content and skill acquisition. Be it in Mathematics or Science subjects. "Drill and Practice" is a dirty word! It was the 'antiode' to good performance! It's a 'guaranteed' way of the getting to the top of the ranking, which many educators believe, not just the past, but also amongst the many today.

I might have dreamt my way through the many years of education, I still remember very clearly my very first encounter of a question in a major exam that required me to think 'out-of-the-box' and see something quite different (in those days when I was still a student). It was a Maths question - pattern observation followed by generalisation to come up with an algebraic expression. It's the first time I saw a 'context' outside Mathematics. I saw organic compounds (structures) appeared in the Maths paper. Still remember very clearly, CH4, CH6... the series... of course, it's a breeze since we saw that in Chemistry. But it was an enlightening encounter when I saw the cross-subject application! Under the exam condition, definitely, it required me to think beyond, especially when it went beyond just the simple organic series!

My second encounter was the "A" level Chemistry question that got to do with the manufacturing of a certain compound in the industrial context, which deviate from (or I should say, built on) what we learnt in the lecture.

Well, 'thinking questions' is actually not new in the Singapore Mathematics curriculum. However, it's many a time 'confined' to "Problem Solving (Hueristics)" type of questions. Many a time, skills are tested - procedural skills, application; rather than conceptual understanding.

Came across an assessment paper recently. There was a heavy emphasis on Algebra that constituted about 3/4 of the questions. Almost 50% of the weightage of these questions focused on procedural skills, to some extent, was testing the candidate the similar skills but disguised in the form of complexity in questions.

Do such questions reflect what the environment tried to encourage - conceptual thinking and understanding, hence application? Or does this only happen in classroom discussion, but reverting back to the 'old school' thinking and practices? Aren't we sending different messages? Are we aligning our practices?

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