Primary students lack interest in natural sciences

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 08/06/2009 11:22 AM | National

Eleven-year-old Ghina Ramadhani delighted in an experimental display at a science exhibition in Jakarta on Wednesday, jumping on and off a mat wired to a showerhead, turning it on and off in the process.

However, the sixth grader from a school in Tangerang, Banten, maintained that she did not “have much interest in the natural sciences”.

“I’m not that keen on studying nature; I get goose bumps whenever I see organs or bugs.”
She prefers the more “daunting” subjects, such as mathematics, because it “requires me to wrack my brains, which is fun”.

Ghina says she loves puzzles, and loves solving them even more. The natural sciences, she says, are less puzzling than mathematics.

The National Education Ministry has become concerned in recent years by the fact that fewer people are taking their university degrees in natural sciences, making it harder for Indonesia to compete globally in agriculture and other related sectors and raising concerns over the absence of competent people to maintain the country’s natural resources.

It seems, however, that the lack of interest in studying natural sciences actually starts early on. Ghina is not the only primary student to find little challenge in the natural sciences.

Steven Kasemetan from a school in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, says he dislikes the subject because “all I have to do is read the books and memorise them”.

“It’s no fun,” the sixth grader says, adding his school rarely allowed the students to experiment.

Slamet, a teacher from state elementary school SDN Menteng 02, said students were easily bored if the teachers were only giving them theories without showing them how the theories apply in their daily lives.

“When students can associate, for example, how water flows with their daily showers, they will understand better and faster,” he told The Jakarta Post.

The problem with teaching natural sciences these days, Slamet said, was that it included little creativity.

Teachers, he added, sometimes failed to provide a way for their students to see the fun side of the subject, whether by engaging them in experiments or playing games.

During his 12 years of teaching not only has he employed those two methods, but he also lets his students conduct small research projects.

Moreover, his method includes an interactive computer-based program that allows students to learn their lessons while playing games.

“Some of my students also build their own experiments using used materials,” said Slamet, who is also a counselor for his fellow teachers in the natural sciences.

He added he would also take his students on walks around the school complex, which has around 7,000 different kinds of plants growing.

On Wednesday, his school’s booth was rated the best, based on its creativity, display and interactivity, by a panel of judges at the exhibition“If the teachers are creative, the students will be too,” he said. (adh)

Govt to attract students to natural sciences

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Tue, 08/04/2009 10:47 AM | National

With fewer and fewer people taking university degrees in the natural sciences, the national Education Ministry is working on ways to attract more students.

“High school graduates today are not interested in studying agriculture, animal husbandry or fishery; these majors are not popular anymore,” a senior official at the Education Ministry, Hendarman, told a discussion recently.

Some universities, he added, had even had to close their agriculture courses because not a single student wanted to take them.

The phenomenon, he said, was ironic, considering Indonesia was an agricultural country.

Academic director at the directorate general of higher education, Illah Sailah, said Monday the declining trend in people applying to major in the natural sciences had actually started in 2004.

“It will be our country’s loss if no one studies these subjects. Who will manage our natural resources then?” she said.

To address the problem, the ministry is looking at ways to attract more students to study agriculture.

“Perhaps by changing the name of the subject into something more interesting,” Hendarman said, adding that “agribusiness classes” have more participants, although they are not that different from agriculture classes.

Soil Science, Agriculture, Cultivation, and Pest and Disease majors are merged into the category of agrotechnology while Agriculture, Social Economics, and Communication and Counselingclasses are combined into the agribusiness course.

“By doing this, we aim to achieve different learning outcomes; we want graduates with general skills that are comprehensive, and not the specific skills regular agriculture classes offer now,” Illah told The
Jakarta Post.

“Besides, industry requires graduates to have the skills to manage everything, from upstream to downstream, so we are trying to respond to the market’s signals,” she said.

Hendarman said a lot of agriculture or fishery graduates do not work in their specific fields of knowledge.

“Rather, most of them are now working as employees in banks, or as journalists, or in other fields,” he said, adding that Indonesia still has a high unemployment rate.

The country is seeing an increase in the number of people who have university diplomas but
are unemployed. In 2008 the number increased by 42 percent to 1 million compared with the figure for 2005.

Illah said that the ministry was also revitalizing the agricultural courses.

“We started giving grants to 29 universities this year so they can renew or add to their educational resources and equipment,” she said, adding that each university receives between Rp 400 million (US$40,400) to Rp 900 million.

Rector of the University of Indonesia Gumilar Rusliwa Somantri said his university has also seen a decline in the number of applicants for natural science majors, however he had another way to attract
students.

“We try to entice them by offering scholarship opportunities,” he said, without going into detail as to the number of scholars the university had accepted. (adh)