The Problem of Knowledge Gap Among Students

Everyone benefits greatly from science, technologies, and its innovations due to their general
applicability and usefulness, especially those people who are in the academic field. It is one of the tools
that bring people together. Indeed, technologies do their work brilliantly, it helps every teaching
personnel do their work easily, life would be more difficult to survive without them. However, numerous
students have reported knowledge gap as a result of using these new technologies as a material for
learning. How can an educator’s teaching strategy affect a student? What are the things that we can do
to end knowledge gap among them?

Nowadays, some teachers use YouTube’s educational videos uploaded by people on the internet as one
of their teaching resources instead of discussing what’s on the book. The internet can help educators
lessen their work, some teachers who do this strategy of teaching expect every student to understand
the whole lesson after watching the video without any discussion. This kind of teaching strategy is
difficult for some students, some of them are having trouble understanding the videos that they are
asked to watch without the teacher’s verbal explanation about the lesson. Not every student has the
courage to ask for guidance from their teacher nor have access to more information that could help
them understand the lesson that they are having trouble understanding. This causes misunderstandings
and lack of information towards the students.

During the pandemic, students had no choice but to study through online schooling. Some of them went
from being an academically inclined type of student to being a student with information gaps because of
the online class set up. Jared, a Grade 9 student said on an interview “As a student, I am having trouble
understanding YouTube videos that I am asked to watch by our teacher because I feel like watching on
the exact social media doesn’t allow me to ask any question with an immediate answer. I think that
everyone would pay more attention if the discussion is live and spoken by our beloved teachers.” This
proves that every student has different preferences when it comes to teaching strategies.

An educator’s teaching strategy and the materials that they use for it affect the students’
understandings. Every student has different preferences when it comes to teaching strategies, some
could easily understand through verbal discussion and some could easily get the gist of the lesson by
reading. Expecting students to easily understand the lessons just by watching a video and self learning
could cause them to misunderstand the lesson and not get enough information about it. Some of them
might not be able to understand the videos on the internet that they are asked to watch by their
teachers. Some students need more guidance and discussion through verbal speaking and live teaching.

The quality of teachers has a positive impact on the student's learning. Grading the teachers
performance in teaching can bring many benefits to the whole education system. Better methods and
insights on how to teach the students would be given to the teachers, and they would be informed on
which lesson plans were effective and which were not. Both students and teachers will benefit from this.
Educators can identify current strengths and weaknesses, and work harder in the areas that need
development. Additionally, students can guide teachers to create learning opportunities that they
actually value. Conducting research inside the campus could also help the professionals figure out which
teaching strategy is more effective on students.