upsr-today.com

Our View about UPSR Examination

Examinations serve many purposes - the main one is to make assessment on the effectiveness of our education process, and subsequently facilitate improvement on the process. Examinations also serve the function of differentiations among students, so that different groups of student with unique level of learning ability can be grouped together for differentiated education.

While UPSR does not eliminate students from the mainstream education process, its results are widely used as criteria for entrance selection for many "elite" schools. Here comes the problem: good students go to good schools, become even better scorers in future exams. Poor students go to not-so-good schools and do even poorer in their future exams. Therefore, "informed" parents will go all out to ensure their children get good grades in UPSR. There comes all these tuition-packed, childhood-less, exam-oriented lifestyle and culture.

We believe examinations like UPSR isn't the real goal of our education system. It is useful to see this as a process to strengthen our children's abilities in many areas. These areas include ability to concentrate, to read, to write, to communicate, to plan, to handle pressure and competitions, and so on. In other words, the UPSR process is very important, not just its final outcome (i.e., the exam results).

All stakeholders of UPSR, the students, the teachers and the parents, could take the UPSR process seriously so that eventually the student become a better, stronger, more capable person after having gone throuht the primary education. Not only the students will benefit from it, the parents will equally grow in their parenting skills and foster stronger relationship with their children. Therefore, it is extremely important that we look at UPSR, which is the first major challenge for our children, as a great opportunity for the family to face it together and grow together!

UPSR -TODAY's Focus

The learning environment of our children consists of schools, tuition centers, and most importantly, the homes. At the least, schools are and tuition centers are planned carefully and run by trained personnel. But at home, most parents have put little thought on supporting the learning process of our children. With the family structure changes from single-income to double-income, most parents hopes to "out-source" the children learning problems to schools and tuition centers. But the weakest link in the learning experience of our children remains at home. Family-induced limitations and problems often hinders our children's learning proces, regardless how much and how well the teachers and the tutors guide them.

It is the recognition of this weak link in our children's learning experience that we setup UPSR-TODAY. We would like to provide resources, sharings, tools, ideas to help parents improve the effectiveness in guiding their children though the UPSR process.

Vision

UPSR-TODAY envisions to bring a system of support to parents and people who care about children undergoing UPSR process. This system supplements the schools and tuition centers which have strong emphasis on teachers and tutors. UPSR-TODAY's system works for parents or caretakers of the children.

Mission

In UPSR-TODAY, our mission is to help parents guide their children to learn effectively in their UPSR process.