CRPP - Conference Papers

This presentation will focus on the adaptations made to the Singapore Coding Scheme for a study on peer learning in primary classrooms. I will discuss both the process of adaptation as well as the (almost) final product, including brief overviews of other coding schemes considered for this classroom study ('Peer work, peer talk and language learning in Singapore primary classrooms'). Critical comments on the adapted coding scheme including it's feasibility, utility for addressing the research questions, and methodological / theoretical integrity (especially in relation to the segments adapted from CORE) would be appreciated.

For many years learning management systems have been focused on providing resources for students. More recently, the growth of digital repositories has provided resources that can be tagged and searched independently of a course structure. G-portal provides resources specifically tagged for geographical learning tasks and provides a project space in which students can collaborate, create resources and share these resources amongst themselves. This paper reviews the research issues surrounding G-portal using activity theory as a framework and defines a research agenda based on the capabilities of G-portal. In particular, issues of information organisation, issues of usability, search strategies and retrieval techniques, multimodality of representation, transduction of information and representation of geographic and spatial information will be examined. The research agenda focuses on three areas: information organisation and representation; the capabilities of the G-Portal application and its ability to integrate and retrieve information and geographical task; and the ease with which students are able to undertake and complete learning tasks about geographical phenomena.

Environmental identity or how we orient ourselves to the natural world, leads us to personalize abstract global issues and take action (or not) according to our sense of who we are. Indeed, the often emotional nature of environmental conflicts can be associated with our sense of personal and social identity. Are we willing to give up our SUV for a more fuel-efficient car albeit our knowledge about the enhanced greenhouse effect? (Clayton and Opotow, 2003). In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of teaching and learning about environmental issues and potentially developing students’ environmental identities, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (terminology by Clark, 1983) needs to be understood better. An obvious affordance of such a digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. A developmental project to build a first digital library for Geographical assets was undertaken. This digital library (G-Portal) serves an active role in a collaborative learning activity in which the students conduct a field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. G-Portal not only functions as a digital library of information resources, it also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can be used on the information provided. The concept of personal project space allows individuals to work in their personalized environment with a mix of private and public data and at the same time share part of the data with their team members. This allows students to explore the information, process the information, solve the problem posed and perhaps even form new understandings and reflections of their role in the natural environment.

Recent developments in handheld telephony have given rise to the ‘mobile internet' - a range of technologies, from multimedia-messaging to access of the internet through handheld devices. These trends have been accompanied by the increasing consumerization of the mobile phone. Many students today have access to a tool, which allows them to connect to potentially anyone else, regardless of spatial co-location. This paper describes a study which was carried out in the early months of 2004, focusing on how the social software of the mobile internet, such as text- and picture-messaging, is used by adolescents in the process of constructing negotiated and shared understandings of unfamiliar environments in which they may find themselves. Students were presented with opportunities to collaboratively explore and navigate unfamiliar environments using the technologies of the mobile internet, as well as to engage in debate, and used multimedia evidence recorded in the field to defend their positions both to peers in the field and subsequently in the classroom.

This paper reports on research-in-progress currently being undertaken under the auspices of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore. The aim of the research project is to investigate the impact of process drama pedagogy on the learning of oral language. In brief, the research involved students at four schools participating in a series of ten drama lessons. The students were pre- and post-tested to determine the impact of the drama learning on their oral communication skills. At this stage of the project the intervention with students has concluded and the data has been collected. While analysis of the full data collection is still underway, initial examination suggests that the use of drama in this context has produced significantly enhanced test scores for the students in the trial. Recorded interviews with students, teachers and facilitators, and facilitator journals will be analyzed to identify other outcomes relating to correctness, responsiveness and agency.

This paper reports on the pilot study of a doctoral thesis which focuses on how the social software of the mobile internet, such as text messaging and picture messaging, is used by teenagers in the process of constructing negotiated and shared understandings of unfamiliar environments in which they find themselves. To this end, the study was constructed such that students were given opportunities to collaboratively explore and navigate unfamiliar environments using the technologies of the mobile internet, as well as to engage in debate, and use multimedia evidence recorded in the field to defend their positions both to peers in the field and in the classroom, regarding various issues of concern to these environments, with specific links being made to their studies in geography

This project describes the trialling of a new form of cooperative learning strategy, in the form of a game known as EcoRangers. EcoRangers is a multi-player game, designed to run on handphones, written specifically for education. EcoRangers is one of the first, if not the world’s first, instances of this totally new genre of pedagogical tools (ie, collaborative handheld educational games). In its current iteration, EcoRangers is designed to help pupils practise skills of relevance to the Upper Secondary Social Studies syllabus, specifically through the pedagogical strategy known as the Structured Academic Controversy, in which learners debate an open-ended problem from a variety of perspectives. The trialling was done in Fuchun Secondary School, among twenty Secondary Three pupils from the Express stream. These pupils were taken through two distinct fieldwork tasks in March and April 2004, with the game being introduced as part of a post-fieldwork activity.

This paper will present the findings of a research project whose major objective was to investigate how teachers think and behave about using a new approach in music education centered on promoting creativity in young children. Focus group interviews were conducted with 30 participants from 2 local kindergarten with nearly equal socio-economic status. These interviews were transcribed and video-recorded for later analysis. The interview questions covered five main topics on the theme “Early Childhood Teachers’ Promoting of Creative Music Education for Young Children” and included : definition of musical creativity, observable characteristics of creative kindergarten teachers in music, types of teaching strategies/activities that stimulate musical learning, social interactions and problem solving and characteristics of musically creative kindergarten children. Preliminary analysis of the findings revealed different views and perspectives concerning musical creativity. Observable characteristics of creative kindergarten teachers in music included flexibility, and willingness to try different methods to encourage enjoyment in children. A creative musical classroom should provide access to musical instruments, integrate music elements into the daily curriculum and provide free play experiences. Music teachers should apply teaching techniques that make use of demonstration and encourage problem-solving skills. Musically creative children express themselves readily are willing to take risks.

Adopting a problem-centred approach helps students to learn Geography more effectively as they are able to identify and generalize about where different resources or activities are spatially located and they learn to associate certain patterns and processes with geographical changes. In an era where web-based student-centred inquiry is gaining popularity as a mode of learning Geography, the role of digital libraries as delivery trucks (in Clark’s terminology, 1983) needs to be better understood. An obvious affordance of the digital library is that it organizes information around themes for problems to be solved. This paper describes a developmental project to build a digital library for Geographical assets. This digital library (G-Portal) serves an active role in collaborative learning activity in which students conduct a field study of an environmental problem, within a geospatial context – in this case, beach erosion and sea level rise. G-Portal not only functions as a digital library of information resources, it also provides manipulation and analytical tools that can operate on the information provided. This study examined two specific case studies as part of a larger study which explored the possible the ways the students can use the G-portal find information, create learning artefacts, construct arguments and explore their awarness of the modality of information sources and in the learning artefacts they created. G-portal was sucessful in providing resources which supported the students in finding information and supporting multimodality in the construction their artefacts.

Digital libraries have been rather successful in supporting learning activities by providing learners with access to information and knowledge. However, this level of support is passive to learners and interactive and collaborative learning cannot be easily achieved. In this paper, we study how digital libraries could be extended to serve a more active role in collaborative learning activities. We focus on developing new services to support a common type of learning activity, field study, in a geospatial context. We propose the concept of personal project space that allows individuals to work in their personalized environment with a mix of private and public data and at the same time to share part of the data with team members. To support the portability of the resources in our digital library, the selected resources can be exported in an organized manner.

To support participant teachers extend their teaching of mathematics problem solving heuristics, we explore the use of a digital repository which comprises a video component, a discussion forum and a databank of classroom resource. The video component consists of extracts from teachers’ classroom practices and workshops which they had attended. The discussion forum is set up partly based on the video extracts and partly on issues raised by the participants. The databank of classroom resources comprises mainly ‘classroom-ready’ mathematical problems. This article looks at some considerations that went into the design of the repository, and concludes with a discussion on related issues of building up and continuing the repository.

Student success in the 21st century requires not only the mastery of basic classroom-type knowledge and skills but also the ability to engage in higher-order thinking, reasoning, and real-world problem solving. This will enable our students to become productive workers and responsible citizens who can also actively participate in lifelong learning. A number of researchers in the United States and Australia have systematically examined the authentic intellectual quality of the teachers’ assessment tasks/assignments and student work in response to the tasks/assignments (e.g., Newmann & Associates, 1996; Luke et al., 2000; Lingard & Ladwig, 2001). These studies have shown that when teachers design and use highintellectual quality assignments that demand higher-order thinking, in-depth understanding of knowledge, elaborated communication, and making connections to students’ lives beyond school, students produce higher quality intellectual work. This paper reports the preliminary findings from teacher-moderated judgments of written assignments or assessment tasks and student work in Singapore. The teachers’ assignments/assessment tasks and student work were collected from 36 Singaporean schools across four major subject areas: English, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science at the Primary 5 and Secondary 3 levels. Subject-specific panels were formed by a group of experienced teachers. They were trained to understand the authentic intellectual standards and to use the scoring rubrics collaboratively prior to their actual scoring of the teachers’ assignments and student work. The paper will report the outcomes of the statistical comparisons of authentic intellectual quality of the teachers’ assignments and that of related student work across subject areas, grade levels, and streams.

Educational leadership for the 21st century calls for a new and different working relationship between educators. In addition to well-known approaches to educational leadership such as transformational, strategic, educative and organizational styles, the notion of parallel leadership is receiving much attention with growing evidence from Australian schools that this leadership style facilitates school improvement. Parallel leadership challenges teachers and members of the school management to establish a more collaborative working relationship. Such leadership entails mutualism between administrator leaders and teacher leaders, a sense of shared purpose and an allowance of individual expression and action by respective leaders (Andrews & Crowther, 2002). Nurturing parallel leadership involves a change in the roles and responsibilities of principals – to lead in metastrategic development – and of teachers – to lead in pedagogical development. Such leadership is an impetus for essential processes of schoolwide professional learning, culture building and approach to pedagogy which will enhance and sustain school outcomes, thus giving IDEAS schools a cutting edge. This enables the knowledge-generating capacity of schools to be enhanced and sustained. Based on data obtained from interviews and fieldwork observations we introduce an elaborated version of the’ black box’ (Crowther, Hann & Andrews, 2002) and provide a discussion on how three principals in Singapore schools, as part of the IDEAS project, embrace the role of ‘strategic leaders’ in the context of parallel leadership. As these principals progress with developing parallel leadership, we expect valuable insight to emerge as to how parallel leadership is functioning in these schools, thus enabling us to provide at a later stage, a more conclusive answer as to what a parallel relationship between teachers and principals looks like in the Singapore context.

Much research about classrooms has focused on what teachers do and their reflections about critical events in their lessons. Comparatively rare are studies that look at how students react to the many incidents and activities that take place during lessons. Students’ perceptions about lesson events form an important but often neglected source of data that can be used to understand the impacts of teaching on learning. This paper reports on some findings of the feelings and thinking of mathematically weak students during mathematics lessons. Four teachers, two from primary (P4) and two from secondary (S1) schools, taught a series of four to six lessons that covered a topic in their scheme of work. During each lesson, the teachers stopped the lesson after some time and administered to their students a one-page in-class reflection checklist about that segment of the lesson. At the same time, the teacher completed a similar reflection checklist from her perspective. This in-class reflection asked students about the purpose and importance of that segment of the lesson, their feelings, and what they were doing. The teachers were able to complete two in-class reflections in most lessons. At the end of the lesson, two target students and the teacher were interviewed about these reflections. The quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to discover similarities and differences in teacher and student perceptions and patterns of responses intra- and inter-lessons. A practical implication is that the teacher can use this simple in-class reflection checklist to obtain information about student responses to the lesson to guide planning of subsequent lessons.

According to Mr. Thaman Shanmugaratnam, Minister for Education, in his address at the “ Innovation and Enterprise in our Schools” Workshop on 16 Feb 2004, the core of I&E is about developing intellectual curiosity, a willingness to think originally, a spirit of initiative, a willingness to do something differently and developing strength of character. Hence one of the key elements that underpin innovation and enterprise is getting our young to question as they learn, thus nurturing the spirit of enquiry. But how could teachers develop this spirit of enquiry in young primary children? Over a period from 1969 to 1986, Matthew Lipman developed a programme for primary and secondary students to foster the development of questioning and reasoning skills. Through the use of specially developed thinking stories as triggers, teachers engage students to discuss philosophical issues, such as friendship and beauty embedded in the stories. The students discover the importance of supporting the views they express by means of convincing reasons. They learn to appreciate the difference in perspectives within the same group through discussion. As they share the tasks of discerning problems and discovering meanings, they begin to build a community of inquiry. Lipman called his inquiry programme “Philosophy for Children” or P4C. He strongly recommends the P4C to be offered to all primary students. To promote the spirit of enquiry in young primary children, an intervention study is undertaken in a neighbourhood school. P4C lessons are implemented in two Primary Three classes. The duration of treatment is three semesters. The project classes are tested on their reasoning skills before and after the implementation of P4C. Video tapes on the philosophical lessons show encouraging progress in the development of enquiry and reasoning skills in the young children.