Hong Kong Students to Choose Their Own Questions

Students are usually seen with a lot of tension and anxiety during exam time. Exam fear is a very common amongst students and may have disastrous effects too. It is recently known that a new approach to education has been found in a secondary school named YOT Chan Wong Suk Fong Memorial Secondary School in Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.

As per this new approach, the students can decide the questions to be asked in their exams. As per YOT Chan Wong Suk Fong Memorial Secondary School, they had initiated this as a testing learning model according to which the students can choose the homework they did, and the questions to appear in their exams. In this new model, teachers examined ability of various students in several subjects at the beginning of school year and then according to the results they can decide the homework and exam questions relevant to each student based on their competency. However now students are set free to choose the questions they want to answer that relieves stress of students and fear of failure. Since this process has been implemented there has been a significant improvement in students’ attitude and their behaviour in the classroom has been observed. Though the students have limited choice of questions, they have been seen more eager to learn. According to teachers’ feedback, this initiative is a huge success since implemented. Due to their incapability to achieve high scores, most commonly, students with special educational needs are the ones who have been suffering with the traditional education system. Edith Wong said “Each of our students has their own strength and weaknesses, but to constrain their success to a set of standardised examination papers is unfair.” According to Hung Yuen-ling, the senior development manager of the Hong Kong Education City Limited which is a government-owned company that pushes for changes in the city’s curriculum through technology, the traditional way of teaching is not so effective and got many problems. She stated that “What we need to do now is to encourage schools and principals to be as committed to making a change, steering away from the traditional beliefs that grades are everything”. However she claims that it is not so easy and simple to implement this method at all schools all together. It needs to be implemented slowly and gradually so that it is easy for the schools to get familiar to this process and adapt this style of teaching. Hung Yuen-ling also said ““Once we can spread the idea of this alternative way of learning, we can then move forward and improve the education system for our younger generation”.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/2178159/hong-kong-school-lets-children-decide-what-questions-should