Today school and college education is more into rote learning. As a result, their cognitive and innovative application abilities are thinned down dramatically and accordingly their output. This turns out to be highly detrimental to the students when they end up in higher education or in a job that demands practical and most often technical-based solutions. Such features have been very well noticed in the recent past among the students in all the higher educational institutes, although the schools and coaching institutes have been producing large numbers of students with high-grade points and ranks. All this is because the students at 11th & 12th are lacking experimental knowledge that is essential for them to excel in higher education. This is just like the fact that the fuel alone is not sufficient to burn, but additionally it requires oxygen. This translates to that though the high school outs have good theoretical knowledge, they lack the ability to make use of it or to excel in their higher education. To combat such a situation, there is a dire need for the students to go through experimental learning along with the theory-based one. Such practice will elevate their experiential knowledge which boosts the immunity of the student to withstand the problems that they will face in their future endeavours, whether it is academic, industrial, governmental or other types. Taking the students through the requisite experiential knowledge should start at 10+2 level itself as the high school outs are the feed stock for higher education and for a variety of other professions. The present generation of +2 students require much more immunity boosters as they hardly had any experimental learning during their +2 studies. Hence, they are not able to bring relevance and connectivity between theory and the practice and are not in a state of mind to design practicable solutions to the problems. This simply means that the high school outs are not accustomed to translating their theoretical knowledge to the application domain.
In this regard there is a lot for us to learn from our governmental health policies which are highly conducive owing to their proactive execution of administering vaccines and boosters starting from the child at birth which resulted in the eradication of a variety of diseases to which otherwise the children are highly prone to. Similarly, an effective policy is indeed desirable to boost the immunity of high school out students, not for their physical health, but to improve their problem-detecting and problem-solving capabilities required in climbing the higher education ladder and or in delivering useful results in the line of the profession that they choose. The correct and effective stage to give the vaccination of experiential learning is when the students are in their 11th or 12th standard and then follow up with the boosters further. The theory learnt by these students would yield positive and useful results only when he / she combines it with requisite doses of experiential learning modules. Injecting requisite doses of experiential learning is essential. Of course, the contents required for the vaccine for experiential learning should be designed with great care by incorporating innovative methods and by using enough of examples that are directly relevant to life and life practices. Of course, the same should be tested well before it is given at large. As the students in their 11th & 12th is mostly busy preparing for a number of entrance tests, the duration of their experiential learning should not occupy a lot of their time preferably, it should be within 2 weeks or so. Since this is just 4% of their total stay of two years, they can spare this much of time easily and effectively. Engaging these students for a longer duration would not be feasible as their corresponding institutes / schools would not permit them to be physically away for other activities than those designed by them, i.e., coaching and preparing them to crack variety of entrance examinations. With proper planning it would be possible to have such a crash and effective workshop to be completed within about 12 – 13 days, without compromising the quality and the breadth of the subject. In fact, we have even drafted one such course of experiential learning modules based on chemical sciences, where the modules address all applications including those relevant to life and life practices.
To implement and execute experiential learning modules, cooperation is essential from the schools, coaching institutes, parents and the government, whether it is moral or material or both. On the other hand, the students are expected to put their conscience efforts into assimilating the experiential knowledge that lasts for long. For sure, all this is possible to implement and expect brilliant future for our children when they come out of 10+2 education.
By : Chebrolu Pulla Rao- Senior Professor at SRM University AP
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