Dear Parents, have you come across these commonly given feedback on your child's answers in Science open-ended questions; "The answer is not to the point", "The concept is not present in the answer" "The answer is not structured well" ... Often, this is a result of your children understanding a concept or topic but being unable to express themselves to attain the marks they deserve.

Here are some tips that your child may find useful in helping them structure their answers. Please understand that these tips are not exhaustive and may not encompass all open-ended questions. Nevertheless, I have found it quite useful when helping children to structure their Science open-ended answers.
 

Here are some common sentence structures your child can adopt when answering open-ended questions. They can use the question stems and the context to help them identify the sentence structures.
 

‘What’ Questions are often questions that test your child on identifying the correct fact. The words that identify these questions are as follows.

Percentage is a topic that often throws a few curveballs in the way of phrasing. Many students are often confused in solving percentage questions as they cannot identify the true base percentage. Here are some examples to help illustrate this concept of base percentage to your kids.

Example 1: Percentage Increase
Karl had a 15% salary increase in starting from January.
Which of the statements is true?
Statement 1: Karl’s salary in December is 85% and his salary in January is 100%
Statement 2: Karl’s salary in December is 100% and his salary in January is 115%.

To solve this, we need to look at the base percentage, which is his salary in December. Statement 2 is correct as the increase in salary should be computed by adding the increase to the base percentage in December.

Example 2: Percentage Reduction
Kenny bought a bag which was 20% cheaper than Lina's bag.
Which of the statements is true?
Statement 1: Kenny's bag is 80% and Lina's bag is 100%
Statement 2: Kenny's bag is 100% and Lina's bag is 120%.

SPEED is a P6 Mathematics topic that often confuses students. Here's a quick look at the five main types of speed questions encountered in the PSLE. Please note that these categories are not meant to be exhaustive and non-routine speed questions may pop out in the PSLE.

For most primary school children, they would have ended their Science examinations and be awaiting their results. Upon getting the paper, parents would realise that their children may not have done as well as they ought to, or may have lost marks where they shouldn't have. Here are a couple of tips to help your children better their Science results.

Tip: Eliminate the distractors

MCQ options that are not the correct answers are also known as distractors, for a good reason. A good MCQ question should test your children's knowledge and distractors serve to 'distract' your child from the correct answer. Remind your children to cross out or eliminate the incorrect options as they answer their MCQ questions.

Strategy: Analyse their incorrect options

What are Science Misconceptions?

Misconceptions can also be seen as preconceived notions, non-scientific beliefs, naive theories, mixed conceptions, or conceptual misunderstandings. Basically, in science these are cases in which something a person knows and believes does not match what is known to be scientifically correct.

Most children who have science misconceptions are NOT aware that their ideas are incorrect. When they are simply told they are wrong, they often have a hard time giving up their misconceptions-- especially if they have had a misconception for a long time.

How do they occur?

Often misconceptions can result in the following situations

1. Children creating knowledge based on incomplete evidence or their naive and intuitive understanding, e.g. 'batteries contain electricity as they can power devices' when batteries contain chemical potential energy which can be converted to electrical energy.