Do you have the skills?

Description
In the class year 5B, Cikgu Salwa, the science teacher was doing revision in the class. The students were required to copy down the questions on the blackboard given by the teacher. The class was divided into 4 groups and each was conducted group discussion between the group members. I took this opportunity to join in among the four groups. In the group, I acted as a facilitator to give some guidance for their discussion as same as the teacher was done with the other groups. During the discussion, students were required to jot down the answer in the piece of paper. After a few minutes, the teacher was called one representative from each group to present their outcomes from the group discussion in front of the class.

Feelings
When I joined in the group, I noticed that the students were did not know how to conduct a group discussion. They were sat at their seat and waited for assist from the teacher. While I giving the guidance to the students, I was asked them some simple questions, for example: Who is becomes the group leader? Who will jot down the answers? Want can you know from the questions given by the teacher? And every member should give their own opinion or view before they were concluded the answer.

Evaluation
From the group discussion, I realized that the students have not much experience to hold a discussion and most of the students were not confidence to give their opinion or view. The teacher was only focused on the outcomes from every group while the students were presented in front of the class. The process skill of discussion was not considered by the teacher. The students not given much opportunity to express their view to the others besides from the presentation that they gave were answer only from their discussion. By the end of the class, the students were learnt to memorize the method to answer that kind of questions only.

Analysis
The questions below were given by the teacher during the class lesson:

Adam carried out an investigation based on the number of pupils who had conjunctivitis. The result of the investigation is record as below.
Month Number of pupils
January-----30
February----40
March-------50
April---------60
1. What is the trend in the number of pupils who had conjunctivitis?
2. Predict the number of pupils who will have conjunctivitis in May.
3. Give one reason to support your answer in (2).
4. In the investigation, state:
i. What is change?
ii. What is measured?

The number of pupils who had chicken pox from July to October 2004 in Sekolah Kebangsaan Labu Ulu is recorded in table as below:
Month Number of pupils
July----------4
August-------9
September---14
October------19
1. What is the trend in the number of pupils who had chicken pox during the investigation?
2. State one inference based on the trend stated in (1).
3. Predict the number of pupils that will have chicken pox in November.
4. State the thing that is kept the same from this investigation.

From the questions given, it is a good opportunity for the teacher to place importance on developing the science process skills of students, and not just emphasize their ability to memorize the answer for each types of question. Although the questions given were not included all the science process skills but the students also need to practice the skills because they cannot be learnt through reading or answering the questions. The science process skills that can be applied to the discussion were classifying, predicting, communicating, interpreting data, and controlling variables.
The teacher should gives the details or explanation about what is the process skills the students can be learn before answer the questions. For example, students should be emphasized on the communicating skill while they were doing the group discussion. The students will learn to communicate in various ways by expressing their ideas or information to other group members in verbally. The students also should be taught how to explain the data and identified the relationships between the variables concerned and made inferences or conclusions.
After the class lesson, I had asked the teacher about the frequent the students went to the science laboratory. I noticed that the students were seldom went to the lab due to the class was not much conducted experiments and the teacher was also bothered about the students discipline in the lab.

Conclusion
As my conclusion from the observation, the effectiveness of the science process skills and manipulative skills used in the science lessons were not utilized very well by the teacher and also confined the ability of learning of the students.

Action plan
These phenomena should be destroying as soon as possible by encouraging the teacher to be more active and creative during the lesson. There is no other way to teaching and learning science lesson from hands-on activities effectively. From experiment, students can learn the both science process skills and manipulative skills at the same time.