It is a generally held view amongst educators today that the development of students’ inference skills is an important aspect in their education as 21st Century learners as it requires higher order cognitive competences. Oftentimes, students in the lower tracks are considered slower learners and may have difficulties with the development of such skills. There is, however, limited empirical evidence to support such claims. As a result, there is a lack of understanding how such skills are taught, and how lower track students acquire them. The purpose of this study is to investigate lower track students’ science inference skills over one academic year, to better understand their learning and development. To determine this, three multiple-choice science inference skills tests were developed based on science syllabus and administered over a 9-month period. In total, 1397 Grade 7 lower track (i.e., Normal Academic) students from 38 Singapore secondary schools participated in the study. The students’ performances were determined through three equated tests using Rasch common-item procedures. The results showed that students experienced greater difficulty with tests over time. They particularly had difficulties with questions pertinent to graphs, tables, diagrams, or charts, or required them to extend their thinking beyond the given information. They also had difficulty in deducing answers using the elimination technique, and items that involved experiments and variables. Items that involved pattern recognition, concluding using range, application of a given concept, and limited information were easier for them. The findings also have implications for science teacher education in terms of assessment literacy, and the science teaching of lower track students.

Where the notion of education used to be (and still is) prevalently accepted as the teaching and learning within formalized settings, 21st century learners of today are developing highly sophisticated, and reflective literacies through participation and play with digital technologies. With the hybridization of learning with popular media culture, learners expect, and derive, little gratification from institutional contexts such as school. Such development implies an pressing need to understand the kinds of phenomena occurring in these so-called progressive (relative to current school practices) learnings and to consider the implications to present settings. Situating our study within the context of the extremely popular immersive multiplayer game space, World of Warcraft (WoW), this research is focused on the intertwining relationship between individual identity and the collective emergence and regulation of social communities within the activities transacted in the game and its related spaces. These issues are investigated in the informal learning space of online guild structures within WoW, while foregrounding central issues of identity and becoming that are core to contemporary media and literacies. The findings arising from this research are meant to inform design principles that will contribute to strongly coupled learning processes within both formal and informal contexts of learning.

We adapt a policy-oriented analytical framework to consider important teacher policy leverages that can help to generate successful learners - the teacher policy strategies framework (TPSF). The TPSF comprises a set of micro-layered strategies focusing on the personal growth of the individual teacher. At the same time, there are macro- layered strategies that are more cognizant of the wider system ecology. These micro- and macro-layer policy imperatives collectively and coherently drive a teacher development agenda. The micro-layer policies are: teacher recruitment; initial teacher preparation; compensation and incentives; career development structures; and, professional development and continuous learning. The micro-layer policies are supported by macro- layer policies that build a robust and coherent ecology of capacity building, identity formation, and change drivers needed to align and steer teacher education. For macro- layer policies we highlight: accountability, performance management and evaluation; school leadership; teacher symbolism; policy integration, alignment and coherence; and, collective teachers’ voice.