Article and Video Review

There are several points from the Rebecca S. Anderson’s article and the video that piqued my interest:

1. Diverse student population

This is especially true in most typical Malaysian classroom scenario (forgive me if I’m overgeneralizing). The students are diverse and are increasing in number, therefore so shall the students’ learning preferences, style and needs as well. It is almost impossible to use a one size fits all technique to cater to all students. If we use the traditional assessment to test the student’s overall performance, we might miss out on what other potential the student is capable of. For instance, we cannot measure a student’s athleticism or speaking ability solely on paper.

2. Constructivism

From a constructivist point of view, “education is about assisting students how to obtain knowledge.” Thus, the process is important and it will help the students to become autonomous in their learning. Students will utilize their schemata and try to find other information at the same time in order to discover about something new in their tasks. I may be repeating some part of the article I’m not aware of or I’m reiterating the basic concepts of constructivism, but I strongly believe that students should be involved in their own learning process.

3. Knowledge has a universal meaning VS knowledge has multiple meaning.

Knowledge is culturally mediated, therefore it is restricted and it does not have a definite meaning – the article says. This means that different people from different parts of the world will have different opinion on how to teach and assess language learning. Plus, we are not culturally similar to each other. It’ll be really interesting to know the other different opinions so we can add the knowledge to our teaching arsenal.

4. Self-evaluation

I don’t really know why this term is so interesting to me. Maybe because until now I have difficulty practicing this myself – it’s hard to fully reflect on your own learning after class because perhaps you have lots of things going on in your mind. Maybe this blog will help journalize the little thoughts I have after class.

5. Test to learn

We did this a lot back in high school preparing for the SPM examination. We did tons of trial papers from different states in Malaysia and from the correction session, we unconsciously learned the papers inside out. Thus we are able to somehow predict the types of questions that will appear in certain sections in the exam paper. It’s both good and not good, anyway it helped me pass my killer science and mathematics papers.