Master of Arts

The challenge of the twenty-first century is about harnessing and creating new knowledge and being able to respond to novel situations in an intelligent manner. Since 1997, there have been a slew of policy realignments and changes to meet the rigor and demands of the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) vision (Chua and Leong, 1997; Shanmugaratnam, 2003; 2004). Prime Minister Lee (Lee, 2004) urged the education sector to re-look at the way teaching and learning is done, specifically how educators could “teach less” to allow their charges to “learn more”. In response, Ministry of Education (Shanmugaratnam, 2004) announced that it would look into trimming the syllabi further to free up more time and space to encourage more student-centered pedagogy and a greater focus on nurturing the core knowledge, skills and qualities in the students. Teachers would be able to encourage the students to think creatively and critically to solve problems, and help them develop positive habits of mind.

This research is a study on the impact of the Habits of Mind on the performance of the students in the Singapore school setting. Studies have shown that positive habits of mind sharpen critical and logical thinking, and there is a correlation between exposure to the Habits of Mind and students’ performance in various assessments.

The study adopted a two-pronged approach for the teaching of thinking skills to the treatment group - independent explicit lessons focused wholly on the teaching of Habits of Mind and thinking skills (Costa, 1991, 1997 and 2001; Costa and Lowery, 1985), as well as infusing habits of Mind into the curriculum (Costa, 1991 and 2001; Swartz and Parks, 1994). The use of Treatment and Control Groups from the same stream allowed deeper alanysis and understanding of the impact of Costa’s Habits of Mind on students’ performance in pre and post intervention logical and critical thinking skills (Roadrangka et al., 1983; Lim, 1983, 2003) tests, and tests in academic subjects such as English, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Geography.

Using statistical analysis, it was found that students exposed to the Habits of Mind scored higher (p<0.05) in the logical and critical thinking tests but did not show significant difference in Physics tests. Although the Control Group showed greater gains in scores for the pre and post intervention tests for GALT, further analysis revealed that the Treatment Group subjects (GALT = 51.3%, CT = 69.2%) actually showed greater improvement for both tests compared to the Control Group (GALT = 43.2%, CT = 37.8%). In terms of thinking dispositions, more subjects from the Treatment Group became formal thinkers, from 23.1% to 38.5%. Interviews with teachers and reflection journals of the subjects in the Treatment Group gave additional insight that the behaviour of the Treatment Group improved, with greater awareness of their thoughts and active practice of the Habits of Mind. Findings from this study could serve as benchmark data for schools interested in assessing their thinking programmes using the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking or the Critical Thinking tests.

Literacy is often taken to be the underlying factor that is essential to educational, social and economic success (Comber & Hill, 2000). At the same time, research has established the complex and multifaceted nature of literacy, and argued that in studying literacy development, it is necessary for researchers to understand cognition in terms of the social systems for developing and utilizing literacy rather than in terms of the cognitive operations of children viewed in isolation. Any attempt to analyze literacy and literacy development then, must take into consideration various factors such as 'habitus' and 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu, 1990).

In this comparative study, the collective influence of literacy beliefs, literacy experiences and socio economic status in two schools sitting at different ends of the academic and socio-economic continuum - one a lowly ranked neighbourhood school in a public housing estate with working class families and the other a top-performing Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools are investigated and an understanding about the likely influences that underpin school achievement is sought. More specifically, the study examines how teachers, parents and the children themselves in the two schools view what counts as literacy and probes into the literacy experiences of the children, both in their own homes and in their respective schools. It then proceeds to explore how these various factors come together and discusses the implications they might have on academic results - the measurement of literacy outcomes by educational standards.

Analysis of the data revealed that indeed, there is a strong link between pupils' background, parents' and pupils' literacy beliefs, pupils' home literacy experiences and parents' past literacy experiences. While parents in both schools generally believe that literacy is more than the mere acquisition of reading and writing, the middle class parents held the belief that literacy is pertinent to communication, allowing them to stay updated on global events and relevant to the world - a view that was shared by their children. In sharp contrast, the working class parents, like their children, felt that literacy would warrant the potential security of jobs. The beliefs that parents held led them to construct different pathways in preparing their children for the ways of school. Noteworthy is that middle-class parents seem to be able to capitalize on their resources and interact effectively with the education system to enhance the achievement of their children.

Where schools are concerned, teachers' literacy beliefs were found to be realized in their pedagogical choices. The deficit discourse that was pervasive in both schools prompted teachers to choose the restrictive drill and practice as their preferred methodology. The study concludes that the middle class pupils' success in the academic arena may be a result of their individual capacities and personal efforts and that family distinctiveness prevailed over the effects of schooling in influencing students' life chances.