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On a Saturday morning, I was relaxing on my couch sipping a sip of tea knowing that my children are asleep as no virtual class were scheduled for today. Just a question rolled into my head, "Are they actually getting benefitted from this E-learning" 'Changes are the end product of all true learning,' but what happens when a sudden shift occurred in the learning itself?
Today, several industries, including the educational field, have been affected by the Covid-19 crisis, which also involves the complete demise of conventional classrooms. The fundamental mode of learning was never supposed to be an online mode.
I was in my deep thought, Suddenly my phone rang and I was informed that the final examinations of the students would be taken offline in the school itself. I was curious about how children would deal with these unexpected and significant life decisions.
The classes were taken online as all the year but now
the children will be judged on their offline results in exams.
Being the mother of three children, I understand very well the difficulties these children face in terms of studies, exams and memorization of this enormous syllabus. It could be staying motivated, distraction, time management or understanding the course expectation.
For school-age children, the memory requirement is much higher than for adults because they are continually bombarded with new information in many subject areas in which they may or may not be interested.
Besides, they are required to both learn and show on a weekly basis the mastery of this knowledge.
Thus for school success, an efficient and reliable memory is important.
For instance, many students have problems memorising,
1- They may understand the three-step path, they were just given, but while carrying out the first step they missed the second and the third step.
2- When reading a paragraph, by the time they get to the end
of the paragraph, they can forget what was at the beginning of it.
3- It is also difficult for them to remember
relevant factual facts, such as dates and grammar rules.
4- Contrary to the efforts made in the preparation, they score less in examinations as they were unable to recall the correct details at the right time.
This is the biggest concern faced by most students and
the one that needs to be discussed at the earliest.
Then I wondered if there were any special and secret strategies for learning those difficult words, formulas, long and difficult answers and growing focus and concentration at the same time.
One of the most common and unsuccessful techniques is the Rote method or Raw Rehearsal, according to our conventional approaches, where we have to recite a fact over and over before they settle in your mind. This is a long, dull and stilted process in which we very easily forget the details.
I can recall that education is something more than 'Classroom lessons' for me. It is something to be passed by human interaction.
Storytelling was the very first form of education, as the story is the heart of us, making us human. What if in our research, we use this story making approach and visualisation method and especially associate them with our own selves so that we feel linked to the data and remember them for a longer time.
Haven't you all noticed that children of all ages very quickly remember and recall a movie consisting of almost 3000 to 5000 slides at a very fast pace?
It's all because these movies are in visual form, with audio and colour in them. So, they feel related to that.
Another method can be by giving a Personal Nickname to a new and strange word. It is also called the Word Substitution Method. It can be used for the information that is is hard to visualise. For example, for the word Destitute which means very poor, the word can be converted into the word that sounds familiar that can be visualised. That is the word destitute sounds like the word(desk and institute). So the students can visualise a very poor child is standing over a desk in an Institute to study. With this system, the vocabulary word, the student is trying to remember actually becomes the cue for the visual image then the cue for a definition of the word.
Other can be Mnemonics and other artificial tricks, songs, Acronyms, Silly Rhyme methods which can be used by the student in their studies.
Such tactics certainly work better than Raw Rehearsals. These all methods will help you a lot but a positive mental attitude will go a long way towards helping you get back on track. If you're stuck in a study rut, take a little time out, clear your head and adjust your way of thinking about your studies. It will work wonder.
Neelima Aggarwal