First published in The New Paper

He wanted his students to steer away from rote learning and be creative thinkers.

So Mr Ong Kim Soon, the principal of St. Hilda’s Secondary School, gave a private school a challenge: Does its teaching method work for students who are not fast learners?

LogicMills took up his call.

It conducted a series of workshops for 79 of St. Hilda’s Secondary 1 students last year.

After the workshop, LogicMills reported that the students showed improvements in four out of six subjects, with mathematics registering the most improvement.

There were 40 students from Normal (Academic) classes and 39 students from the Express classes who attended the workshop.

Mr Ong, 40, said: “During a talk by LogicMills, I gathered that its programme was catered more for higher-ability students. So I posed a challenge to Professor Mark Nowacki from the school: Do his methods work for lower-ability students like those from the Normal (Academic) stream?”

Natalie Lee, 14, a student from a Normal (Academic) class, used to regularly get F9 for mathematics. Now Natalie scores over 60 per cent in the subject during tests and exams.

She underwent just 11 sessions of the logic workshop conducted between May and September last year, where students played strategy or intellectual games, and did logic reasoning exercises, among others.

Natalie said: “I used to be very slow in catching concepts in class, but with the help of the workshop, I understand the questions much faster.”

She added that she never used to be able to catch the “deliberate mistakes”, which her teacher made to see how alert the students were. Now she spots them easily.

Because of the success of the experiment, Mr Ong has extended the workshop training to all Secondary 2 students for five months this year.

Students attend the one-hour course every week in school after class, and they pay S$80.00 to S$100.00 for the entire workshop, with the school subsidising about S$150.00 more.

While the course aims to boost analytical thinking, some students were more delighted at seeing their memory work improve.

They were Express student Joseph Tay, 13, and Nicole Mui, 13, who is from the Normal (Academic) stream. Nicole said she doesn’t have problems with dates in history class anymore. Her science grade has also improved – from an F to a C grade.