Improve your grades by joining the right H2 chemistry tuition in Singapore

It is no surprise that many parents today (especially in Singapore) engage tutors to give their children tuition. In fact, I know of many children having private tuition for many years. And there are parents spending $200 to $400 each month just on tuition for their children.

How do you know when you have found a tuition centre that you can trust? Your child is already struggling academically and the last thing you want to do is waste money and time with a tuition centre unable to help them improve. Following are some questions that should be asked of a H2 chemistry tuition centre prior to trusting them with your child. If they can't satisfy you with their answers, you should keep searching for a better tuition centre.

1: What are the credentials of all teachers within the centre?

This is perhaps the most important thing when interviewing a tuition centre to see how effective they may be with your child. If teachers in school are failing to educate your child so they improve their grades, someone with little to no teaching experience is not going to do much good.

The best tuition centre in Singapore for your child will be one with professional teachers with a lot of expertise in what they are teaching. They should have years of experience to show that they know how to teach children and help them improve their grades.

It's one thing to ask about the teacher who will be interacting with your child in the centre, but asking about all teachers in the centre overall is important as well. The best centre will have a policy of only hiring talented, dedicated teachers.

2: What types of teaching strategies are used in the centre?

Once you verify that the teachers in the centre are dedicated to their work and qualified to be in their positions, make sure that you agree with all of the teaching strategies they may employ with your child. You are looking for a H2 chemistry tuition centre that will employ creative strategies that help struggling children see the material in a new light.

If your child is having difficulty absorbing the information as it is presented in school, the teachers in a tuition centre should be prepared to take a new strategy to help them learn in a different manner.

3: How many students will be allowed in a single class at a time?

You don't want to sit your child in a class with twenty students and one teacher trying to teach them all at one time. Make sure there is a cap on the student-teacher ratio so your child receives enough attention to really make a difference.

That's a lot of money, isn't it? It is no surprise that the private tuition industry in Singapore is a million dollar business every year.

Having said that, many parents whom I have spoken to, very openly shared with me that their children's school results do not seem to improve in spite of the tuition.

In fact for some of them, their school results actually deteriorate as they move higher in the education system. These parents feel quite discouraged too. They really want to do something to help their children to improve; however other than engaging tutors for their children, they just don't know what else they can do. And ironically, tuition does not help them and they are spending so much money on it.

Personally I have nothing against tuition. On the contrary, I truly believe that tuition can be helpful for students who have a weak foundation in the subject. With the guidance from good tutors, these students can build their foundation and they can progress with more confidence and achieve better grades.

Having said that, why are so many children not doing well in their school despite having private H2 chemistry tuition?

In fact, one parent confessed recently that her son, who is now in Secondary 4, has private tuition in chemistry since the beginning of Primary 3 - and that's a total of 7 years. And during these 7 years, the family has spent around $10,000 just on tuition alone. And the result is - his grade before the tuition is 51% while in Primary 3 and in last year's final year exams her son's history result is 59.5%. A mere of improvement of only 8.5% over the 7-year period!

There are a few possible reasons why students are not doing well despite having tuition at home. However there are two very important and common reasons to this issue but are unknown to many parents, teachers and students. They are:

1. Students are not aware of what they don't know

The beginning of true wisdom is to learn the art of knowing what you don't know. Exams result is simply a reflection of what we know and don't know about a specific subject. For example, if a student scores 40% for his exams, what this means is that he has yet to understand 60% of his work. The way to improve his grade is to know what are the things that he still doesn't know, and then look for ways to help him learn and understand those things. Once he can do that, he will be able to answer all the questions and hence improve his grade.

Unfortunately many students do not know what they don't know about the subject that they are learning. Hence regardless of how much time they spend studying for the subject or how much tuition they take, as long as their learning is not addressing the things that they don't know, they are not going to improve.

2. Students are not using the right learning techniques to help them learn the content

Attending lessons in school and going for tuition class have one thing in common. That is, students are learning the content of the subject. Although our students progress from one level to the next in the education system, majority of them are not taught the learning techniques to help them understand and absorb that content that the teachers and tutors expect them to learn.

Without the right learning techniques, no matter how much content we pile up on our children, they simply do not have ability to absorb them.

Most of our students only know one learning technique - rote learning i.e. learning by repetition. Rote learning for H2 chemistry tuition is bad because using this method, students are simply memorising, but without much understanding. Hence that is why they are not able to store the information in their longer term memory that will help them do well in their exams.