Abstract:

In Singapore’s education landscape, the Polytechnic Foundation Programme (PFP) is a through-train programme that leads Normal (Academic) students who performed very well in their Singapore-Cambridge General Certificate of Education Normal (Academic) Level (GCE N(A)-Level) examination directly to the diploma courses in the polytechnics without having to complete GCE Ordinary Level (O-Level) examination. At Singapore Polytechnic, these students are further streamed into 2 different tracks: the Science and Technology (S&T) track and the non-Science and Technology (non-S&T) track. Students in the S&T track will embark on diploma courses in either engineering, build environment, chemical and life sciences, or IT and cybersecurity upon their successful completion of PFP. Whereas students in the non-S&T track will embark on diploma courses in either business, media, arts, or design. Regardless of their tracks, the Singapore Polytechnic PFP students are required to undergo a 1-year broad-based foundation course in sports, mathematics, science, language and communication, and citizenship education. Among these subjects, mathematics and science, particularly physics, are the most challenging. Furthermore, students who fail PFP will not be able to progress further to their pre-selected polytechnic diploma. Therefore, to help academically less-inclined students improve their academic performance in mathematics and physics, we organized weekly remedial lessons on these 2 subjects. The lessons were conducted by lecturers who would teach problem-solving strategies and provide additional questions for drill and practice. Students who were identified as being at-risk of failing either one or both subjects were invited and strongly encouraged to attend the remedial lessons, though it is not enforced.

This paper thus expounds on the effectiveness of the remedial lessons on these students’ academic performance over one semester (20 weeks). We gauged students’ academic performance by tracking their percentile rank in the mid-semester test and the end-of-semester test, conducted some time in the 7th and 20th week of the semester. We then comparatively analyzed the academic performance of those who were identified to be at-risk and regularly attended the remedial lessons, against those who were also identified to be at-risk of failing but seldom or never attended the remedials. A survey was also conducted to garner qualitative feedback from those students who regularly attended the lessons. Interestingly, while students who attended physics remedial lessons regularly performed better in the physics end-of-semester test than those who seldom or never attended. Students who attended mathematics remedial lessons regularly performed less desirably. We will elaborate on these findings in our paper. We will also elaborate on peer-to-peer tutoring, which we believe is a better strategy to help at-risk students improve their academic performance than instructor-led remedial lessons.

Keywords:

Polytechnic foundation programme, remedial lessons, teaching mathematics and physics.