OER - Reports

Creativity, collaboration and critical thinking are recurrently featured in contemporary global learning frameworks as capacities essential to 21st century (21C) living and thriving. While these competences have long been upheld as integral to human progress, they were historically regarded as expressive affordances and educational aspirations ascribed to more elite groups in society. However, in today’s knowledge economies characterised by complexity and rapid change, these no longer remain the province of the privileged, but are central to one and all’s productive participation in local, global and virtual societies. This is now more of an empirical fact than rhetoric. Economists have shown in a suite of recent studies that cognitive academic skills only account for 20 percent of labour-market outcomes, while 21st century skills such as collaboration and creativity emerged as much stronger drivers of workplace and life success (Levin, 2012).
Yet, there is little doubt that the dynamic and non-linear nature of 21C skills and their constitutive interactional processes are posing significant challenges to conventional practices of teaching and assessment today. Despite notable international efforts in the teaching, learning and assessment of collaborative and creative problem-solving skills in recent years, clear empirical insights that illuminate the relationships between students’ creative competencies and their problem-solving success on ill-defined collaborative tasks remain elusive.
Our research project aimed to address this knowledge gap by turning the lens of inquiry towards the interactional dialogic processes through which Singapore secondary school students accomplished their collaborative and creative problem-solving tasks online. By (i) using secondary data generated from the international Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) research programme’s Singapore school trials that captured student-pairs’ chat logs as they jointly solved ill-defined problem tasks online, and (ii) drawing from theoretical and methodological advancements in the fields of creativity and computer-supported collaborative problem-solving (CPS), we sought to first develop and validate a discourse-based analytic framework for characterising and measuring collective creativity (CC) competencies; then to explore the empirical relationships between CC competencies and collaborative problem-solving (CPS) success among Singapore secondary school students.

The implementation of Integrated Programme (IP) to allow students to skip a high-stakes examination at the end of Year 4 is an unprecedented step in the history of Singapore’s education. This study was timely in collecting baseline data at the beginning of the IP within the same school that offers the express (“O” level) track and thus allows the comparison of pre- and post- IP data between the Express and IP students. Such a research design was not possible in an earlier Ministry of Education (MOE) IP study as the schools involved then only had students in the IP path. However, this NIE-study provides more in-depth knowledge about the IP intervention and how it affects learning with greater confidence. Specifically, the data from this study provides multiple forms of comparisons that is, IP versus Express programme outcomes; General Certificate of Education (GCE) “A” levels versus International Baccalaureate learning pathways by which 21st century competencies (that is, critical thinking, creative thinking and readiness for self-directed learning) have been achieved. Finally, this study includes an additional measure of creative thinking, which was absent in the MOE IP study. The study also provides insights into how different school types that is, autonomous versus independent schools, respond to curriculum innovation in the context of IP. The question therefore is will the removal of the high stakes examination in fact provide a conducive space to build teachers’ adaptive expertise (Hatano & Inagaki, 1984) in curricular innovations?

MOE and MCCY have been working on a National Outdoor Adventure Education (NOAE) Master Plan since 2014. The NOAE Master Plan intends for the entire cohort of secondary 3 students to experience a capstone 5-day expedition-based programme at Outward Bound Singapore (Ubin / Coney campuses). This programme aims to strengthen our youths’ self resilience and social cohesion, where students from different schools will be mixed together. Shared common experiences will be created through team-based challenges and expeditions around our island. There is currently a lack of valid and reliable instruments that allows educators to assess learners’ values and dispositions such as confidence, resilience, independence and inter-dependence during the expedition-based camping experiences. Thus, there is a need to develop and validate instruments to collect information on the different aspects of the secondary three students during such adventure-based camp experiences, as well as to inform future refinement for outdoor education for all students.

This study's goal is to explore how secondary school English teachers in Singapore develop 21st century competencies in their lessons. Specifically, the research project has two key objectives: 1) to explore how secondary English language teachers in Singapore facilitate their learners' acquisition of cross-cultural skills in the teaching of writing and representing; 2) to create data-driven principles and strategies for the successful development of cross-cultural skills in the teaching of writing and representing. This research is significant given the introduction of the Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes by the Ministry of Education Singapore (MOE, 2010a, 2010b) which highlights the need to develop skills necessary for living in today's globalized world and in Singapore's multicultural context. Cross-cultural skills are part of the framework's core competencies, along with civic literacy and global awareness, and aim to enable learners to develop a ''broader worldview, and the ability to work with people from diverse cultural backgrounds'' (MOE, 2010a). Interestingly, despite the existence of extensive literature on 21st century skills and intercultural education, empirical research which investigates how teachers work in everyday settings with these concepts is painfully scarce (see e.g. Halualini, 2011). Most published work present conceptual guidelines on how to develop cross-cultural competencies and global awareness. Research that investigates classrooms is therefore lacking and it is this gap that the present research project aims to address. In addition, the results of the project will provide practical, classroom-based guidelines for English language teachers on how to implement the Framework for 21st century Competencies and Student Outcomes and facilitate cross-cultural learning in their lessons. A multi-case study approach is chosen as the methodological framework to gain in-depth understanding of how teachers incorporate (or not) cross-cultural skills in their writing instruction. The case study approach is selected as ''case studies are the preferred method when [...] 'how or why' questions are being posed'' (Yin, 2009, p.2) and they do not require any control, or manipulation, of events and variables within the research context. We define the 'case' as the process of developing cross cultural skills in a unit of work that primarily aims to teach English writing skills in Singapore Secondary 1 and 2 classrooms. The key figure in the research is the classroom teacher as they are the ones who make decisions that facilitate the process that we explore in our project. Therefore, when selecting cases, we focus on the teacher. Six teachers from three secondary schools will be selected as the participants of the research, based on their teaching experience (minimum three years) and their willingness to participate. The research questions investigate the interplay of three key facets of classroom practice: a) teachers' choice and exploitation of teaching materials to develop cross-cultural skills; b) what teachers actually do in the classroom in terms of strategies and techniques used; and c) teacher cognition, i.e. teachers' thinking and beliefs about developing cross-cultural skills. Data will come from three major sources: 1) teaching materials, including the unit and lesson plans any accompanying materials; 2) lesson observation (video recording and field notes); 3) interviews and focus group discussions with teachers. The key deliverable of the project will be the document 'Principles and strategies for the development of cross-cultural skills in the writing classroom'. This will be disseminated to educators through local workshops and conference presentations. Furthermore, project will lead to a follow-up intervention research project which will see the implementation of the principles and strategies outlined in the document.

Over the past decade, the Singapore government has introduced various initiatives such as Teach Less, Learn More and engaging minds to develop students’ 21st century competencies. One significant approach adopted in these initiatives is to encourage school-based curriculum innovations (SCI).This current initiative involves the participation of all schools in the system. A marked departure from previous practice, schools in Singapore now have more autonomy and space in SCIs through engaging in school-based curriculum development (SBCD) activities. In this study, we used the terms SCI and SBCD interchangeably. This study is novel in taking a comprehensive approach in developing this baseline research of curricular and pedagogical reforms of nine schools in Singapore.