Educational Research AY2015/2016

Based on the 2010 report by Mother Tongue Languages Review Committee (MTLRC) which was carried out by the Ministry of Education (Singapore), the trend in the number of Malay language students using English as the dominant spoken language at home is on the rise. Furthermore, it was found that home language has a great impact on students’ attitudes and proficiency in Mother Tongue Language. Coupled with the bilingual learning environment and the lack of usage of Malay language in school, errors in students’ Malay language written work is inevitable. This research focuses on the Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA) which aim at identifying error of morpho-syntax and explaining the reasons for this error. Scripts from 36 Primary 2 and 3 students from English speaking homes were collected as the research data from two different schools. Samples were analysed by means of a mixed method both quantitatively and qualitatively. In general, the highest percentage of error analysis is evident in graphology with 44.6%. Morphology recorded the second highest with (32.2%), followed by syntax (20.4%) and lexical (2.8%) respectively. Hence, this research will aid teachers in teaching and learning of second language acquisition especially in a bilingual education system like Singapore. It is also crucial to scaffold student’s learning interest which could reduce percentage of errors generated.

Previous studies have opened up possibilities that linguistic landscape can support classroom learning. The aim of this research paper is to get a glimpse of Singapore teachers’ perspectives of how Linguistic Landscape can play a part in students’ language learning process. The findings of this paper revealed that teachers do see the potential of signboards being educative because of their authenticity nature, but the process of utilising them as a supplementary resource has to be carefully executed by trained teachers in order to fulfil educational goals.

The linguistic landscape in a community could potentially be a useful resource for language learning. The purpose of this paper is to study (a) the types of texts evident in public or private signs in a Singapore neighbourhood, and (b) how these public or private signs can support English language teaching in a classroom. Implications for teachers are provided in this report.

Background: Systematic reviews have been done to study the effects of backpack carriage on biomechanics of walking. However, none has been found so far which studies on a children population. Objective: The aim of this systematic review is to summarize the relationships between the backpack loads carried by students with the biomechanics of walking. Methods: A search of literature was done on electronic literature databases EBSCO, Taylor & Francis and ScienceDirect. Subsequently, publications were included and excluded based on their titles, abstracts and by reading the studies in full. Included publications are those that report findings on the kinematics and kinetics of walking in school children. Results: Backpack carriages with load conditions between 10% and 20% have been found to have significant effects in the kinematics of school children especially in trunk inclination angles. In terms of kinetics, backpack carriages resulted in an increase in ground reaction forces and plantar pressure. Conclusion: Carrying backpack between 10% and 20% of body weight would alter the kinematics and kinetics of walking in school children.

In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on the Zika virus, categorized as a global epidemic after reports of its detection in various countries and territories across the world epidemic. Since then, Zika had received widespread coverage in both the international and local news media. This study analyses The Straits Times (ST) one of Singapore’s major broadsheet to assess the framing of its news coverage from 1 January to 31 June 2016, in relation to the risks imposed by the Zika virus. Four key frames were identified: Information of risk-magnitude, citizen as risk manager, sensational content, and comparison of risk scenarios. Findings revealed that news courage was highly dominated by the frames of sensational content and comparison of risk scenarios that exhibits high sensationalism, and contained a significant amount of information to promote self-efficacy.

Target vocabulary which is not be pitched at learner’s level of competency might affect learners’ comprehension and further lexical acquisition. Thus, the aim of this research is to review curriculum materials specifically to examine if lexical words taught in a primary school follows a structure that will best enable effective acquisition which will be done through examining the frequency of the words in spelling lists from the primary three level to the primary six level. To examine if the frequency of occurrence of words in spelling lists, the British National Corpus and Nation’s AWL are used. In this study, evidence against intuition was found as no words with more than 500 p/m occur at the Primary Three level. Furthermore, likely familiar words (e.g., believe) are taught later than more cognitive demanding words. Frequency of targeted vocabulary also shows a lack of consideration for balanced stylistic coverage as well as a lack of consideration to include words of the academic register. Therefore, the findings are evidence that teachers and curriculum developers’ lack in consideration to use frequency as a tool to construct vocabulary lists which can be an effective tool for discovering useful words for learners.

Strategies for English Language Learning and Reading (STELLAR) is a literacy programme in Singapore that is text-driven and supplemented with research-based teaching approaches and instructional materials supplied to teachers. STELLAR was fully implemented in 2015 and is seen as an example of effective scaling up of an innovation (Pang, Lim, Choe, Peters & Chua, 2015). This study aims to explore the relationship between the teachers’ concerns based on their years in the education service and years of STELLAR experience and the changes made by them during the reading component of STELLAR across schools. The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) will be used to examine the teachers’ implementation of the programme. Two of the CBAM diagnostic tools used to study this implementation are the Stages of Concern questionnaire (SoCQ) and the Levels of Use (LoU) interviews. The adaptations made by these teachers will be compared based on their number of years of experience; the rationale for these changes will be derived from the interviews. The role of teachers in curriculum enactment is of great concern, because they play a crucial role in the scaling up of any innovation. According to Curdt-Christiansen and Silver (2013), “Policy innovations have little effect when teachers have difficulties in understanding the pedagogical assumptions underlying the policy goals and when their own pedagogical beliefs are not taken into account” (p. 248). If teachers do not understand the intent of the innovations, such innovations will be left outside the classroom. By examining and understanding the concerns of the teachers and the changes made, curriculum developers can ensure adherence to the intent of the curriculum, while allowing space for flexibility in the teachers’ adaptations. This will then help reduce the usability gaps.

Pictures, as well as written discourse, convey meanings. However, the capacity of visuals as meaning making resource is often overlooked such that visuals in picture books are not given significant attention. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore visual and discourse interaction, specifically in children’s picture books by Anthony Browne. Visual literacy was adopted for visual analysis while critical literacy was adopted for discourse analysis. The findings indicated that the visuals in Anthony Browne’s children’s picture books convey meanings that can either support or contradict its accompanying discourse.

My research study focused on the role of the school and home linguistic environments in relation to early bilingual skills in receptive vocabulary and expressive language. The research study is part of a larger longitudinal project, and takes on a mixed-methods approach. Twelve children were examined from the larger project of one thousand and five hundred pre-schoolers from various pre-schools across Singapore, regardless of their Mother Tongue languages. Owing to this, the participants may come from very different types of pre-schools and may have different home linguistic backgrounds. Although Mandarin, Malay and Tamil skills were assessed across the larger sample, this paper will only focus on findings among children who spoke Mandarin. The findings indicate that the types of school did not have a strong relation to young children’s abilities in the receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills in both English and Mandarin. On the other hand, home linguistic backgrounds did play a vital role in young children’s acquisition and development of receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills of both English and Mandarin.

Students worldwide often face difficulty in generating the functional rule underpinning a linear pattern generalising task. The difficulty can get even more pronounced when the figural pattern depicts a quadratic relationship and is not presented as a sequence of successive configurations. This paper draws on a research study conducted in Singapore that investigated the generalisation of four figural quadratic patterns by 32 Year 8 students (15 boys, 17 girls) from one secondary school. The figural quadratic patterns were presented in two different formats: (i) a sequence of three secessive configurations, or (ii) a single diagram or a sequence of two or three non-successive configurations. The students were distributed into two groups: one assigned to the former format and the other to the latter format. Of the 32 students, 15 of them (7 boys, 8 girls) were given the patterns with successive configurations whilst the remaining 17 (8 boys, 9 girls) worked on patterns with non-successive configurations. This paper focuses on the students’ performance in just one of the four figural quadratic patterns. Specifically, the success rates, the kind of generalising strategies adopted and the kind of rules generated by the two groups of students will be described in greater detail using examples of students’ generalisations. Overall, about 72% of the students in the two groups combined succeeded in generating a correct functional rule, producing a variety of mathematically equivalent rules using a wide spectrum of generalising strategies.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of using the nonlinear pedagogy (NP) in the teaching of fundamental movement skills (FMS) in children. In the first phase, a total of 26 Primary 2 students went through 7 intervention lessons consisting of activities related to catching and overhand throwing. The Test of Gross Motor Skills – 2nd edition (TGMD-2) and a checklist of 3 developmental stages were used as the assessment tools in the second phase, which involved the students being assessed on 6 object control skills that included catching and overhand throwing. Results for the group’s total average raw score of catching and overhand throwing increased by 28.57% from pre- to post-intervention. Positive impacts of NP approach were seen with the students performing better in the post-intervention, as well as the achievement of successful outcomes without conformity of the TGMD-2 criteria.

While teachers tended to support programmes they believed would be beneficial for their students (Datnow & Castellano, 2000), they found it difficult to implement new initiatives like the STELLAR programme as intended by the developers because of the existing educational structure in Singapore (Silver, 2011). This study, thus, aims to explore teachers’ current implementation of writing using the STELLAR programme and how their concerns about implementing STELLAR may have affected the fidelity of their implementation. The research draws on Stages of Concern (SoC) and Innovations Configurations (IC) from the Concepts-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) to examine how teachers’ concerns of the programme translated to their implementation of it. Findings from the research saw most teachers adapting and improvising the curriculum with additional resources, due to reasons such as a lack of time and insufficient guidance within the programme. A greater understanding on the extent of the modification teachers have made to the programme and the reasons behind these modifications would enable curriculum developers to devise more flexible and adaptable materials that are able to better support the teachers in their practice.

With the rapid development and increasing use of technology in this twenty-first century, it is important for schools to equip students with both Information Technology (IT) and Information Literacy (IL) skills. Although both IT and IL were Ministry of Education (MOE)-based initiatives, IT initiatives were often adopted and implemented in schools as compared to IL initiatives. It was found in existing research that the lack of IL instructions in schools was mainly due to teachers’ lack of IL knowledge. This paper thus reviewed and analysed IL programmes that were being implemented overseas since the use of IL is clearly lacking in the Singapore context. The suggestions for effective implementation of IL skills in Singapore schools were to introduce an IL course in teacher education and to implement a library period programme for students that is integrated with the school curriculum.

Kampung is regarded as a place rich with its tradition and values towards the Malay community. However, due to the vast changes made over a period of time, Singaporeans, especially the younger generations are not able to experience and understand the significance of a kampung. Hence, in order to revive the glory and significance of a kampung among the children in Singapore, efforts such as the utilization of children’s literature was done. Children’s literature is a powerful avenue that were able to foster and develop the concept and meaning of a kampung to its children readers. Thus, in this research, researcher explores how kampung themes is reflected and analyses the effectiveness of this themes through the usage of illustrations and narrative descriptions. Overall, the illustrations in all the selected books had proven its effectiveness in portraying the kampung themes to a large extent.

The term 'art space' suggests a physical space that portrays an architectural structure and infrastructure that would cater for musicians and artists to create, work and portray their craft. Many iconic art spaces in Singapore such as the Esplanade Theatre has fulfilled that purpose and have even added to the overall Arts Landscape of Singapore. However, beyond its physical purposes, there needs to be an emphasis that art spaces also provide a social environment for music and art communities to interact with the public especially from our local artists and the community of Singaporeans. The research would focus on the exploration of pre-assigned and public art spaces located within Singapore's own suburban neighbourhood areas that showcase how local music communities and groups make use of them for their music-making purposes to connect and interact with the communities of Singapore. This research is explored using videography as the main empirical research process and presented with an ethnographic documentary as the final product.

A small-scale qualitative study involving Primary 5 students from a Singapore school, investigating their conceptions of assessment in terms of purpose and usefulness of assessment, particularly with conventional and alternative assessment. The findings are similar with conceptions found in existing literature and reflect students’ awareness of the purposes, with “testing of knowledge” being the main response. Student participants’ reactions were also gathered and found to be largely negative due to the competitive and pressurising need to do well in assessment as a form of academic achievement. This study provides an exploratory insight into students’ conceptions and reactions as well as pedagogical implications for educators.

This paper reviews the main benefits and challenges teachers, students and institutes may face while using blended synchronous learning and some possible strategies to overcome them. This paper also looks at the main factors to consider for designing effective blended synchronous learning. For example, having common display across all users, choosing a suitable platform and features, modes of blended synchronous learning. Strategies like: enhancing students’ and teachers’ e-learning competence, explaining the structure of the course to students, teachers’ preparation and delivery of lessons and support from various parties, can be used to effectively carry out blended synchronous learning.

With the aim of forming a guideline on the optimal seating arrangement in a two-seater sprint kayak, this study compared the performance of K2 kayak crews when they were seated in their regular seating arrangement and when their seating positions were switched with each other. The performance of the K2 kayak crews was compared based on the time taken to complete a 200m trial, average power, and average acceleration. Data collection was done with an action camera, two power meter paddles, and a mobile accelerometer app. This study was on four female two-seater crews from tertiary institution teams. Results showed that when the more experienced and heavier paddler takes the back seat, a faster time is taken to complete a 200m trial. Hence, this study recommends that the heavier and more experienced paddler should be seated at the back of a K2 two-seater sprint kayak.

Children attending pre-schools should acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions to develop holistically. Therefore, promoting thinking skills in children is necessary. One of the ways to develop and promote thinking skills in children is through “dialogue such as questioning and challenging” (Higham, Tönsing & Alant, 2010, p.393). This dialogue can take place during story-telling activities. This study looks into 6 Kindergarten 1 and Kindergarten 2 teachers’ interactions during story-telling activities. Results have shown that teachers have mostly asked factual and procedural questions. The questions asked also belonged to the lowest cognitive level of Bloom’s Taxomony of learning domain. These results show future implications for various stakeholders.

This report delves into the key plays The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (hereafter, The Coffin, 1984), Mama Looking for Her Cat (hereafter, Mama, 1988) and Lao Jiu (1990) written by local playwright Kuo Pao Kun (1939-2002) to point out the key themes that students of the 21st century will be able to learn from. Kuo addressed social issues within the Singaporean society in these plays that will be able to resonate with youths as they face similar issues such as the dilemma between meeting society’s standards and creating one’s individuality, the marginalisation of the elderly in a digital era, and the paradox of society’s rules. What students cannot achieve through classroom textbooks and pen-and-paper tests are the social and emotional competencies that they are capable of learning through drama: relationship management, responsible decision making and social awareness and embedded within core values: responsibility, care, harmony and resilience. As Singapore’s education system primarily focuses on facts and fixed knowledge and leave little room for students to learn values and key competencies, it leaves gaps in pupils’ learning (Tan, 2006). These skills and knowledge that are the gaps in learning are most often learned in informal learning, which are difficult to plan, hence teachers often deem them as unproductive. However, it is through explorations of social contexts that content is learnt with experience in a dialectic manner (Lee & Hung, 2012). These gaps occur because students are not critically engaged with their learning material, and the activities they are exposed to provide little ‘hands-on’ in spontaneous decision-making, expression of perspectives and understanding and appreciating from different angles of an issue. Drama, however, enables students to express their perspectives in physical, symbolic ways that creates depth in learning where “experiences and ideas are exchanged and subjected to to criticism, where misconceptions are corrected, and new lines of thought and inquiry are set up” (Dewey, as cited in Chan, 2009). Introducing Kuo Pao Kun to a classroom of young learners will see to a resolution of his themes and ideas fitting perfectly with the gaps in the education system. Kuo’s theme of multiculturalism in Mama Looking for Her Cat (1988) is a relevant one that proposes the social awareness competency, as students in Singapore encounter diversity daily. In addition, in The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (1984) and Lao Jiu (1993), the ever apparent issue of conflict with one’s principles and belief systems is an applicable issue to introduce responsible decision-making to students. These competencies mentioned are the tools pertinent to the creation of students’ own identity and individuality as they embark on other challenges in life. In this paper, the lesson plans will demonstrate how Kuo Pao Kun’s themes within his plays can be infused in lessons to develop well-rounded individuals capable of managing relevant social issues that Kuo had pointed out in his work. Drama and theatre activities such as tableaux, hot-seating and role-playing can involve students in deep reflection and creative, critical thinking. Incorporating drama in lessons makes learning interestingly unconventional and ignites passion and interest in pupils, which is exactly what pupils need in order to close the gaps in the education system (Tan, 2006).