DISCUSSION ISSUES ON DISPARITIES IN

ACHIEVEMENT OF STUDENT

GROUP NAME:NOR SHUHADA SURIA SHA’ARI

FATIN AMIRA YUNUSATINA HASANAH MOHD GHAZALI

WHAT IS MEAN BY STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT?

• Student achievement is doing well academically, obtains life skills and giving back to their community.

• Sometimes, student achievement is based on teacher quality.

RURAL AREA

Rural area is a geographic area that is located outside cities and towns.

National Education Association said that the low performing youth are in public rural schools(Brown&Swanson).

Less achievement than other schools, variation exist between states.

For example, there is a large math achievement gap between rural and non-rural areas but some rural areas area are above average and other are just average(Brown & Swanson).

URBAN AREA

average income of parents (defined as combined financial incomes of father and mother) in urban areas was found to be RM21,417 per year as compare with RM12,438 (about 40 per cent lower) for rural parents.

availability of resources like books, computers, art and science supplies and course offerings. The availability of fewer resources in many rural schools than those in urban areas are often related to more limited curricula for these rural schools (DeYoung and Lawrence, 1995; Hall and Barker, 1995).

WHY THERE DIFFERENCES IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

FAMILY TEACHER

STUDENT

FAMILY NO Family support and achievement in mathematics and science

or academic.

Students who obtain parental support usually achieve a good academic record.

Parental involvement in education of their children can have a positive impact in the development of their children.

TEACHER teachers do not use the correct method for teaching and learning

activities based on students' ability levels.

teachers teach too fast. therefore students do not understand and then make students less interested in the subject.

STUDENT Personality factors play an important role in influencing a

student's academic achievement (Eysenck 1979).According to psychologists, personality includes thoughts, perceptions, values, attitudes, character, ability, confidence, intelligence, motivation, habits and so on.

Students who have extrovert characteristics of sociability, quickly remove opinion, friendly, creative, and be more open with better academic achievement.

Normally, students will be good and successful when they are friends with a good friend and hardworking.

HOW TO OVERCOME THE PROBLEM

Many steps have to be take to make sure that performances in education among rural school are same with urban school.

To overcome this problem we have highlight a few factor that effect the performances.

The several ways should be taken are the role of:

1) Student

2) Teacher

3) Parent and environment

4) Management of school

5) Ministry of education

STUDENT

The students itself should realize the importance of education in their future lives.

If they want a better life in the future they must study hard to get a good performance.

Usually students at rural area does not care about their education and most of them dropout from schooling. This is because they do not have motivation in their study and their parents also did not care about their performance.

So in order to overcome the gap performance between students in rural and urban areas, rural students should set their mind that education is important to change their lives. When they have a mindset that education is important, they will study hard in order to get a good achievement.

TEACHER

The teacher is an important force in school learning.

Teachers also one of the sources that can help in overcomes the problem of low performance among rural students.

Teachers can help in encouraging the students to study hard and help them to complete most of their work at school during study time, where students can ask teachers if they do not understand about the lesson.

If they are doing work at home, nobody can help them since their parents might not be able to assist because most of parents in rural areas have less education. Teachers should encourage their students to participate in many activities because it will give them the opportunity to build their self-confident and positive self-esteem.

Besides that, teacher also can create a caring and supportive environment where students will feel more comfortable during their learning. Good relationship between students and teacher also good in order to improve students’ performance where when teachers are close with the students, students will feel easy and not shy to ask anything that they do not understand.

PARENT AND ENVIRONMENT

While the teachers play their role at school, parents should play their roles at home.

Although parents in rural areas have no education, they can help their children performance in terms of giving them moral supports and motivation to learn.

Even they cannot help in terms of provide resources to learn, they can give a support to their child to study hard to change the fate of their family.

Parents should realize how important of education to their child and their future.

Parents can always ask their child about their learning progress and accompanied them during doing their work.

They also must always care about their child performance and monitor their progress.

SCHOOL

District Education Office and the parties must prepare a report containing diagnsis student achievement.

Classroom organization plays an important role in attracting students follow the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Headmaster / Principal of the school as an organization administrator must explain clearly the matters relating to the Mathematics Panel like in structure and organization, its aims and objectives and roles.

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION

Government has to play a role in improving educational outcomes for rural students.

Government should provide enough facilities to the schools that located in rural areas same as the urban schools. Besides that, government also must provide a financial support to the students that lives in rural areas where we know that most of them come from low income families and not affordable to gain a better education and services.

Facilities that were provided must be fair and equal treatment should be given to rural schools same like urban schools.

In addition, best educators also should be placed in rural schools because they can help students to improve their performance.

Good teachers will produce good students. Most important is government should ensure that teachers are adequately qualified to teach the subject that allocated for them and they can do their work properly.

Education department also should visit all schools to establish and verify their needs to ensure that resources are allocated in line with their needs and status.

OUR OPINION

From the results we have discuss, what we want to conclude that there are differences of school achievement between urban / rural areas. Most obvious is the rural schools. We said this was based on the search that we do. It is further strengthened by the results of statistical PMR and SPM urban / rural Malay 2009, in his article titled National Views On achievement gap of urban and rural students.

CONCLUSION The study presented the differences of performances between students in rural and urban areas. Rural

and urban schools are characterized by its unique strength and weaknesses. “Rural and urban schools are much the same when it comes to resources and learning environments” (EQR, 2003, p.45). Yet there are many variables that affect students’ achievement and those variables are directly related to whether a school is considered a rural or an urban school. Some factors that contribute to the gap performances between students in these two areas were determined and also recommendations in order to overcome this problem were suggested. Although some recommendations have been highlighted, solutions might not be easy for them.

The suggestions for improving the performance among rural students is that they must understand their environment properly, and maintain their inner resources like self-efficacy and self-esteem. From this study we can conclude that, there have differences between students performance in rural and urban schools. Students that lives in urban area will get high performance excel opportunities provided by their location. Urban students have greater access to many resources and therefore have opportunities that are not easily accessible to rural students. Besides that urban parents were more professional and they realize the advantage of education. Parents of rural students were less likely to expect their children to advance their education. From the comparison of this study we can know what the differences between rural and urban schools are.