Your child is struggling to adapt to this new learning environment.

While some topics covered in the Secondary 1 Science syllabus build on existing prior knowledge learnt in primary school, most of the other secondary school Science topics are completely new.

In secondary school, Science is taught as three independent subjects: Biology, Chemistry & Physics.

Your child will need to know how to digest a lot of new content in Biology, be familiar with the chemical terms used in Chemistry and complete mathematical calculations in Physics.

This may be disorienting to some students who are not comfortable with change.

Your child has trouble understanding new keywords, question structures and answering styles.

What has worked previously in primary school may no longer be applicable in the Secondary 1 Science context.

Your child has to re-learn most of the content from scratch and develop his/her own problem-solving skills. Application questions are even more common as compared to what they are used to in primary school.

When being presented with so much content, it can be challenging for students to keep up with the pace of learning in secondary school.

Your child is uncertain about how examination questions can possibly be tested.

It is tougher to gain access to past year examination questions for a particular Science subject because schools tend to teach these three Science subjects in their preferred sequence.

This is further made complicated with Science associated with different academic streams (IP/IB/Express/NA/NT), thereby translating to questions of varying difficulties depending on the depth of the syllabus.

As a result, most students typically rely on topical assessment books from bookstores. Unfortunately, most assessment books are not comprehensive enough to cover a wide variety of question types that may possibly be tested.