Chan (second left) presents the merit award to Louis Liew, witnessed by (from left) Soon, Manyin, Lim and Lau.
KUCHING: Sarawakian students’ performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects is very poor at 24.3 per cent, observes Minister for Education, Science and Technological Research Dato Sri Michael Manyin.
In this respect, he calls upon the parents to encourage their children to take up fields of studies related to these four subjects.
The minister also stresses about the need to improve the children’s performance in STEM as this is related to Sarawak’s development as a whole.
“I’m extremely nervous and worried about the next five to 10 years, with the Fourth Industrial Revolution coming in. We need people who have the technological skills and knowledge, but unfortunately, today in Sarawak, our STEM performance is very, very poor.
“The Ministry of Education Malaysia has a target of 60 per cent of our students to be qualified to enter Pure Science classes at Form 4 level. Sarawak is only 24.3 per cent, against the whole of Malaysia’s 25-26 per cent,” he spoke at the Malaysia Institute of Chemistry (IKM) Sarawak’s ‘Chemistry Night 2019’ in Chemsain Building here last Saturday.
Manyin feared that the performance rate might drop to 10 per cent at Form 6 level, and to five per cent at university level.
At the same time, he also pointed out the need to improve Sarawakian students’ proficiency in the English language, as over 90 per cent of books in libraries everywhere are written in English.
This is connected to the move of teaching Science and Mathematics subjects in English, starting next year with Primary 1 pupils at all Sarawak schools – except those in Chinese-medium primary schools (SJKC), of which 2,853 teachers are currently being trained to accommodate this change.
“Hopefully through this, our students could learn better, and at the end of Form 5, they would be better in understanding the scientific languages and also in improving their English.
“But starting with English next year is not going to be easy. I’m going to form a monitoring committee slated for the first six months. If we don’t monitor, it would be a failure.
“Sarawak is the first state to run this initiative – we cannot fail,” he said.
At the event, IKM Sarawak Merit Awards were presented to students in various levels.
The recipients are Louis Liew, Pung Cheng Hui, Tracy Kong, Azreen Farhana Mohd Hasnain, Eve Callysta Valerie Maclin, Thien Ai Hua, Nur Dzaina Zaidel and Dr Khadijah Khalid.
The event was held to celebrate IKM Sarawak’s 33rd anniversary.
Present were IKM president Datuk Dr Soon Ting Kueh, IKM Sarawak chairman Dr John Chan, IKM Sarawak past chairman Lau Seng and event’s organising chairman Nigel Lim.