Significant impact with only 15 minutes weekly intervention of digital tools in math lessons in Malaysian public schools.
Malaysian-Finnish team gave initial preview for the 34 weeks co-research project results at the residence of His Excellency, Sami Leino, Ambassador of Finland to Malaysia.
Mr. Petri explained how the project was initiated already in 2019 with the Universiti Sains Malaysia, but due the Covid pandemic and movement restrictions was postponed until 2022. He was followed by Assoc. Professor Dr. Shaik Abdul Malik who highlighted that this was not the first collaboration project with USM and Finland, but there has been a pedagogy development pilot project focusing in teaching coding in public schools in 2021. Due the restrictions that was implemented online.
Mikko-Jussi Laakso from Turun yliopisto – University of Turku gave overview of the project objectives and refrences of similar project done in other countries like Lithuania and Hong Kong. They have over 20 years timeline in studying the learning analytics in mathematics and other subjects in his department.
Miin HUey Ang from USM introduced the project implementation. Altogether 10 schools selected by Penang Education Department participated in the research. Schools swapped one of the weekly math lessons with Finnish digital math exercises. Teachers were given training and online support.
Prof. Pekka Räsänen introduced the initial results of the project. The analysis showed that pupils who had spent at least 15 minutes per week during ten weeks doing math tasks with the Eduten platform showed significantly better basic number skills at the post assessment compared to the non-training pupils who used the same time participating in typical math lessons. The training had also an effect on pupils’ attitudes towards mathematics. A weekly 30 minutes digital training reduced learning anxiety towards mathematics. Interesting in the data seems to be that similar boosting effect was seen in any demographics and any equally with students from lower performing and higher performing groups.
