Book Review : Understanding Lower Secondary Science Series
I have encountered many parents asking about assessment book recommendations recently online. I will talking about the Understanding Lower Secondary Science Series from GLM in this post. Hopefully readers will find this useful.
Just take note, i am in no way affiliated to the publisher or the author of the book, and i am not taking a cut from writing this. I'm writing this solely to inform my readers who are looking for assessment books.
Understanding Lower Secondary Science Series, GLM
This series comes in 3 books for physics, chemistry and biology, covering the generic lower secondary science syllabus in Singapore.
In each book, the content is divided into separate chapters according to the national syllabus. Within the individual chapters, the content is broken down into multiple sections. The content first display comprehensive notes that that covers the particular section of the chapter (See image below). In terms of notes, i find that they are pretty self sufficient, comprehensive and on point. It is very useful for students who want to read up on the topic on their own. The user likely does not need to refer back to the textbook.
A Sample of Notes Found in Understanding Chemistry Lower Secondary Science, GLM
After the notes that are provided for the particular section of the topic, a short exercise precedes. I find this very useful for two reasons. First, it gives the student a feel of what concepts in the section is important and the student can focus on those. Second, this acts as a self assessment for students to check what they already know, and what concepts need more work on. However, there is a small handful of questions in this section of the book that will never appear in the school examination papers due to the way the questions are being phrased.
A Sample of a Revision Practice after the Notes in a section of the book
Finally after many sections, at the end of the topic, there will be 2 to 3 practices comprising of multiple choice questions and structured questions. The answer key is also comprehensive with explanation. I have the same feedback about the structured questions here, they are mostly use to assess the understanding of the student. A small handful of the questions may not be an ideal gauge of what the school examination questions will be like.
A sample of MCQ questions from the Consolidated Practice at the End of the Chapter
As a whole, i think this book is good for a student aiming to use it as a self study guide because of the way the content of the book is being laid out. i.e. chunking of notes, short self assessments at the end of individual sections and finally consolidated assessments at the end of the chapter with clear answers and explanations. The student can gauge their understanding through the questions.
However, it is not as ideal if one would want to use it as an examination simulation firstly, because there are no marks allocated to the questions hence the student cannot get a feel of how the weightage of the marks changes and how the questions should be answered to attain the full score. Secondly, some of the questions are designed differently from what examination questions would test on. So if the book fits your criteria, please head over to the nearest bookstore to get it.
I will be writing more about the other books that i use in my classes. Please watch this space for more!