Suara Hati Ayahku

Last week I went to present 2 papers on mathematics education in a conference called “ICMER 2010” organized by UPM and UPSI in Melaka Hotel, Malaysia. 13 and 14 DECEMBER 2010. I brought along my wife and two daughters – one about to graduate in TESL UiTM and the other one a 15 year old PMR student. The objective was to expose them the ‘good’ life of a researcher in this conference.

I was very impressed with the key speakers namely Prof Robyn Jorgensen from Australia and Prof B. Kaur from Singapore. I missed the chance to hear from 2 key notes speakers from Japan and Germany because I was so absorbed entertaining my family in the Hotel Century Mahkota, Melaka.

It took me two different days to present my work. First it was about the effect of a multimedia interactive courseware in learning pre-algebra among 137 students in a polytechnic, PKB, Kelantan. Malaysia. The findings was many students can learn effectively pre-algebra using technology and team discussion. Without collaborative learning (team work) they can still learn pre-algebra. Doing remedial work in the polytechnic set-up is too time consuming if the lecturers are too involved in helping the poor achievers. The courseware is more than enough. The point is the polytechnic should let the students use the courseware and learn pre-algebra by themselves. Let them be independent learners. The lecturers should focus on higher level of mathematical skills like problem solving.

The next day, I presented another paper called The influence of team work in learning pre-algebra without technology. The findings was learning collaboratively on word problem solving among 30 students was far worst than the control group (traditional teaching). I found out that there were problem in playing the roles under STAD set up as recommended by Slavin (1995). They didn’t work because they failed to understand the major roles that they should play as the temm leader, assistant team leader, reporter, general manager and time keeper. Each team has 5 players. The main block was the difficulty to solve the word problem as Phamjit Singh (UiTM, Shah Alam) had found out from his study among upper primary school students. During conversations and interview sessions, these polytechnic students confessed that solving word problem, was a new experience to them as in the secondary schools their teachers concentrated more on solving number problems like fractions and direct computations. Some teachers helped them to score the minimum passing marks in order to enter the polytechnics’ education set up. By doing so, the teachers always missed many important topics such as the final challenging tasks - word problem solving (Marzita Puteh, 2003).

Other than presenting my papers, I watched closely the work by UTP and MMU as a whole. And there were few things that I need to mention. First, they have 2 groups only ( experimental and control ) groups. Of course both universities discovered that experimental group outperform the control group. It was obvious .. but none of them mention anything on the Hawthorn effects. That surprised me. For your information, I set up four different groups called Collaborative Learning only group, CD only group, CDiCL only group and the control group. In the analysis section I had used ANCOVA where pre-test marks were taken as covariate and post-test marks as the dependent variable. Gain score was incorporated in the post-test marks.

Other papers were from Iran and other Arab countries. I listened attentively to what they wanted to say .. but .. as a whole .. their ‘spoken’ English has so much to catch up with the world. I prefered the papers from Singapore since NUS came out among the top 10 universities in the world. The papers were written very clearly. I think I should try to write as clearly as theirs in future. Now I am thinking hard to attend a conference in Singapore in the coming future. Insyallah.

I missed the key speaker from Japan. My friend from MMU Miss Aminah Ahmad told they were very good indeed. Well if you brought your family along to a conference, there must be some plus and minus all along the way. The plus was .. you enjoyed their companionship throughout the 2 days in Melaka and the minus point was .. you missed so much of the golden time you should have interacted with the foreigners. God willing I will come again to ICMER in future .. but this time I will come alone. Laugh.

Good. UPM and UPSI. You did a very good job. Congratulation!!

p/s: why not UPM gave us old Journal in Mathematics Education as a souvenir instead of the book mark (tags)? He..he..