Students should be encouraged to take up science in school even if they think it is too difficult to handle, said Professor Datuk Dr Jafri Malin Datuk Abdullah of the Centre for Neuroscience Services and Research director at Universiti Sains Malaysia.
Today, only 23% of those in Malaysia’s upper secondary schools are studying pure science. The country targets a 60 to 40 ratio of science to arts students in the coming years.
Jafri was speaking at a STEM Forum at the 17th Malaysia Technology Expo in February on career paths in the fourth industrial revolution.
“The problem will show up in Form Four when students are placed into either science or arts stream. I was at a high-performance school recently that scored good results during the latest Form Three assessment (PT3) and nearly half of them wanted to drop physics in form four,” Jafri said.
Most pupils had a reasonable idea of which subjects they want to focus on – science, creative studies or humanities, Jafri added.
However, he stressed that studying STEM subjects develops students’ problem-solving skills, which is important for the working world, whether it is in a science related field or not.
Another academic at the STEM Forum, Professor Datuk Dr Halimatun Hamdan of Razak School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, said there are “very pressing global challenges in the 21st century”.
Solving those challenges “all depends on how well-versed in STEM are a people of a country”, reported the New Straits Times.
On a separate occasion, the chairperson of the Malaysia’s national STEM movement had asserted that schools must make the effort to make STEM subjects “interesting, easy to understand, more hands-on and exploration-based”.