KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 26 — The decision by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to abolish examination-oriented learning for school students is aimed at reducing their stress, the Dewan Rakyat was told today.

Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek said in this regard, the MOE has taken an approach to ensure that the focus of learning in schools is based on inquiry, exploration, experience, contextualization and assessment that fully looks at the holistic development of students.

"This classroom assessment will provide a better benchmark, especially to see and assess children more holistically involving classroom, physical, sports and curriculum assessment components as well as psychometrics and student tendencies.

"The approach we are taking to ensure that there is no longer a focus on examination orientation and to reduce their stress, but rather offers a much more interesting learning ecosystem,” she said during a question and answer session at the Dewan Rakyat today.

She was answering a supplementary question from Tan Kar Hing (PH-Gopeng) who wanted to know whether the Ministry of Education was prepared to review the school curriculum to reduce academic stress among students.

Meanwhile, Fadhlina said the Ministry of Education always gives priority to the welfare and well-being of students, including psychosocial and mental health of students, among others implementing the Healthy Mind Screening as an early detection mechanism to identify students facing emotional disorders.

"Healthy Mind Screening is carried out once a year for all students from year five to form six, while students identified as having severe and very severe emotional disorders are given immediate help twice a year.

"Students who show early signs of depression are given immediate help through focused interventions using the Healthy Mind Module, Healthy Mind Intervention Programme Module and Adolescent Mental Health Module which implement stress management skills, problem-solving skills and managing emotions well,” she said.

Regarding the psychological well-being screening for teachers, she said that 92.7 per cent of teachers have a psychological well-being profile based on profiling teacher well-being using the Psychological Well-being Inventory (IKPsi).

She said that the Ministry of Education is also developing a Teacher Well-being Index (IKG) to measure teacher well-being through the domains of resource availability and use, teacher autonomy and competence, work and environment harmony, psychological well-being and support systems. — Bernama