OER - Reports

The aim of this study is to examine whether the gender of the model used in advertisements promoting physical activity affects their effectiveness.

This research programme consists of three main phases of work that aim to examine the effectiveness of a Nonlinear Pedagogy approach at various levels of the human movement system. The three main research objectives of this research programme are as follows: a) To investigate the effectiveness of a Nonlinear Pedagogical approach for learning a sports skill (i.e., tennis forehand stroke); b) To investigate the effectiveness of a Nonlinear Pedagogical approach in learning a modified net/barrier game (modified tennis); c) To investigate the effectiveness of a Nonlinear Pedagogical approach in teaching and learning a unit of modified tennis in a physical education context.

Storybook reading to children is considered an efficient way to provide a meaningful context for exposure to unfamiliar words and grammar (Weizman & Snow, 2001). Nonetheless, children with limited language knowledge (e.g., child MTL learners in Singapore) may benefit less from the reading activities, due to the gap between their skills and those required for processing the narration. They often fail to derive the meaning of unknown words/grammar from the verbal context and consequently have trouble figuring out the story plots (Verhallen & Bus, 2010). Children’s electronic storybook (e-storybook) seems to hold great promise to assist in developing children’s emerging literacy as such reading formats are favored by children due to its entertaining elements (e.g., sound and interactive games) (Hio, 2015).
Compared to traditional print books, well-designed animated e-storybooks can stimulate readers' visual, auditory and even kinaesthetic senses to comprehend a story and unfamiliar language via the match between nonverbal sources (motion pictures, images, sound and music) and the narration (de Jong & Bus, 2002; 2004; Neuman, 1997; Verhallen, Bus, & de Jong, 2006). It is especially promising for second language learners/bilingual child learners, because these children with less language knowledge at hand may need extra information sources to digest the story plots and grasp the new words and grammar.

The goal of this proposed study is well-aligned with MOE and OER’s focus on assessing 21st century competencies which are crucial for student academic success and holistic development. This study involves the development of new instruments for the large-scale assessment of student thinking. This study is grounded on the needs of MOE to provide evidence-based policy formulation to help improve pedagogical practices in schools.

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.

Argumentation has been widely recognized as an effective approach for science education. Much effective argumentation happens between multiple participants who engage in evaluation, reflection, reasoning, and decision making through arguments and counterarguments in relation to a specific scientific topic. However collaborative argumentation rarely takes place in school science classrooms though researchers have developed some computer-based systems to support the argumentation. One of the critical issues is that teachers and students lack support in scripting, evaluating and reflecting the scientific argumentation. This project developed AppleTree system to script the collaborative argumentation and provide automated assessment through multi-dimensional learning analytics and visualization. By tracking and analysing the data of students’ behaviours in the learning activities, learning analytics and automated assessment not only improve the design and delivery of instruction of the teachers, but also help students understand their learning in a more meaningful way so that they can act upon on the fly.

This study builds upon recent research into Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices in Singapore secondary schools (Brown, Deneen, Fulmer, Leong, Tan, & Tay, 2017 April). It aims to extend our understanding of certain AfL competencies highlighted in the latter study in a more specific context of an inclusive classroom, particularly mainstream school classes with students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The incidence of ASD in Singapore is one in 150 children, higher than World Health Organisation's global figure of one in 160 (Ng, 2017). Students with ASD have the cognitive abilities to benefit from the national curriculum, but face challenges in social communication and socialising. They find it difficult to read the intentions of others or see the bigger picture because they tend to use their superior detail-focused cognitive style (Engeland & Buitelaar, 2008; Happe & Frith, 2006). It is challenging for them to benefit from the classroom dialogue in which teachers ask questions to elicit evidence of learning as well as give feedback to advance the students' understanding. However, there is currently no study to help us understand the phenomenon in Singapore schools. To help bridge this gap, this exploratory qualitative study seeks to understand, in the context of an inclusive classroom, a) How would effective questioning and teacher feedback look like, separately and when used together? b) What do ASD children consider to be effective questioning techniques and teacher feedback? Participants will include 6 teachers from schools (both primary and secondary) trained in special needs (TSN) will be observed during a lesson in a class which has ASD student. Both the teacher and the student will be interviewed separately after the lesson. The findings of this study will extend our current understanding of AfL in the context of inclusive education where every child is valued and enabled to learn (UNESCO, 2005).

This study utilized multiple data sources to examine the pedagogical content knowledge, beliefs and practices of beginning and experienced physics teachers in the context of teaching electricity. The more experienced teachers expressed greater awareness of their students’ conceptual difficulties, but only when they have sound understanding of canonical ideas on electricity. Regardless of experience, several teachers had limited awareness of the students’ conceptual and procedural difficulties in relation to electricity concepts that are difficult to understand, such as potential difference. Beginning teachers tended to focus more on the conceptual aspect while the experienced teachers focus more on the mathematical aspect of the students’ conceptual difficulties.

The transition from being students to first-year teachers can be a satisfying journey, and yet has the potential to be a significantly challenging life transition for many beginning teachers, and it is not different for any physical education (PE) teachers. This is especially so when these novice teachers are expected to fulfill similar roles and responsibilities as their more experienced counterparts in the schools. There is without a doubt that teacher education programmes provide the opportunities for these novices to develop their expected skills, knowledge, and attitudes to become qualified teachers. Therefore, it is reasonable for these individuals to learn a lot during their teacher education experiences, and to be effective at some beginning level. However, it is not reasonable to expect them to completely master these skills independently from experience alone, without any sustained and purposeful continuing professional development (CPD) and school-based support during the beginning years of their profession.
For many education systems and government, the difficulties faced by beginning teachers is of grave concern, and points to the need of specialised forms of assistance or support mechanisms, using a variety of CPD strategies, structured induction and mentoring programmes. Scholars have also argued that besides helping beginning teachers, welldesigned and high-quality CPD and school-based mentoring are critical to improving the quality of teachers, schools, and to some extent, student achievement. For the Ministry of Education (MOE), teacher continual learning and professional development, coupled with building a strong core of mentors for the younger generation of teachers, have always been a key thrust in the MOE’s strategic direction to developing a highquality teacher workforce (Heng, 2012). To support this vision, the Academy of Singapore Teachers (AST), and other specialist academies, like Physical Education Sports Teacher Academy (PESTA), have been established to spearhead professional learning and development for the subject-specific fraternity.

The core aim of the project was to initiate a program of research that contributes to the systematic, Institute-level development of a rich and contextualised understanding of the nature, substance and professional impact of student teachers’ learning.

The core purpose of this project was to characterise the development of student teachers’ professional competence and identity in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Specifically, the project studied the impact of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes within National Institute of Education (NIE) on student teachers’ development of professional competencies and teacher identity. This, and the earlier related OER 13/09 LEL and OER 4/10 LEL work, was the first systematic attempt in Singapore to provide empirical evidence that could ultimately help to inform policy on, and practice of, teacher education programmes.

This is the fourth in a suite of four projects which aim to establish an evidence-base for the continual review and enhancement of initial teacher education (ITE) and early career teacher professional learning and development (TPL&D) within Singapore. Therefore, this project is the continuation and expansion of our three previously funded research projects (OER 13/09 LEL, OER 04/10 LEL, and OER 15/11 LEL). Specifically, this project investigates how ITE programmes and the first two years of teaching experiences impact the development of professional competencies and identities of student teachers and beginning teachers (BTs) in Singapore.

Since 2009, the PI and her team have been building an evidence-base to help inform policies on, and practices of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes in the National Institute of Education (NIE) and early career professional learning of local teachers in five research projects. Building on and extending the team's earlier work on ITE and early career teacher learning, this project intends to characterise the impact of experience—both cumulative and episodic—on career-long development and sustainability of Singaporean teachers. Understanding teacher career development and sustainability beyond the early career phase will become more important as the age of Singapore’s teaching force increases, in line with the nation’s demographic trends. This project aims to contribute to the chain of evidence linking ITE with subsequent within-career experience to understand whether and why teachers’ professional identity, competence, and commitment change over time.

Language plays a significant role in the learning of science. While teachers in science classrooms generally recognise the importance of language in the learning of science, many of them pay little explicit attention to the language issues. Students’ language-related challenges are at least two-fold: not being able to fully understand the meaning embodied by the language; or the lack of linguistic resources and skills to articulate their understanding accurately. Those students who have difficulty making sense of the scientific language may eventually develop insufficient level of scientific literacy required for higher educational opportunities in science.
To date, existing intervention studies with similar aims to integrate literacy and science instruction have focused mainly on the strategies and conditions for enhancing students’ use of the language in science. It follows that there is a need to examine the extent to which teachers are able to identify the nature of students’ language-related challenges in order to respond with targeted pedagogical support. This research provides the baseline understanding that in turn informs the intervention component of this project. The assumption underlying such a research focus is that the identification of the nature of students’ language-related challenges empowers teachers to diagnose and address students’ related challenges; and make informed pedagogical decisions about which form of interventions will better serve the needs of their students, thereby leading to a better understanding of how language operates to make meaning in science.

Introduction There are many cogenerative studies which have claimed that the process of engaging teacher and students in cogenerative dialogues have resulted in changes in the teaching and learning praxis (Roth, 2006; Tobin, 2014; lm & Martin, 2015). However it is unclear to what extent the effect of those changes implemented make a difference to students' engagement and learning in the classroom. Jn addition, studies have also claimed that cogenerative dialogues reduce power dominance among participants (Tobin & Roth, 2005). The discussion process requires the participants to be in equal footing in terms of power dominance. No one voice is more significant than the other. This translates to building closer rapport, trust, respect and relationship between the students and the teacher, (lm & Martin, 2015). However most of the studies mentioning reduction in power dominance were from the United States and the data collected from those studies was qual itati ve in nature. There is research potential in investigating the effect of cogenerative dialogues on student engagement and learning and the effects of cogenerative dialogues on power dominance in the Singaporean context. Significance of the study Student engagement and learning are potentially the key success factors in determining the effectiveness of the changes emerging from cogenerative dialogue discussions. Sharan (2008) categorised student engagement into three domains: (1) behavioural engagement, (2) cognitive engagement and (3) emotional engagement. Behavioural engagement focuses on the students and how on-task their actions are during lessons. Cognitive engagement targets the learning that occurs in the students. Emotional engagement relates to the student's personal connection to the subject matter and the teacher. Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris (2004), posits that student engagement in the context of learning involved the interaction between behaviour, cognitive and emotions domains. I am keen to capture the behaviour and cognitive engagement of student participants through video recordings and capture the emotional engagement through recordings of heart rates. Video recordings will be used to capture students' facial expressions, gestures and gazes while oximeter recordings will be used to capture changes in heart rates. It is in my research interest to determine if the data captured from the oximeters corroborates with the data captured from the video recordings. The synchronisation of both data will result in event-triggered moments which will be documented as evidences of transformation in student's learning. I am also keen to capture the interplay of power dominance among cogenerative dialogue participants and how their emotional states changes as they interact. The data will allow me to capture evidences of possible transformation in the teacher-student relationship resulted from multiple cogenerative dialogue sessions.

Children are by nature curious and they are motivated to explore the world around them. Their science process skills develop as early as infancy and throughout their informal schooling years. A lack of external stimuli in the environment which allow them to actively engage in science learning may result in them not developing fully in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective aspects. As such, science education at early childhood is of great importance to many aspects of a child's development and researchers have suggested that children should begin learning science in their early years of schooling. In Singapore, science is not formally introduced to the Singapore school curriculum until primary three. However, some teachers do teach science to primary one and two students. In the MOE Kindergarten Curriculum Framework, the espoused views about the roles science teachers should undertake and the learning outcomes of science learning can be found in the learning area ''Discovery of the World''. This is a proposal for an exploratory two-year research study ''Children are Natural Scientists'': Learning Science in Early Childhood and Early Primary Years that aims to examine how Singapore young children (ages 4-8) engage in science learning. The research question and sub-questions we want to address are: How do young children engage in science learning? 1. How science process skills do they use as participated in the science activities? 2. What forms of science talk do they use as they participated in the science activities? This is a first Singapore study that introduces science to preschool and early primary children. The short-term goal of the study is to develop knowledge about ways preschool and early primary Singapore children engage in science learning. Our long-term goal is build on the work done in this exploratory study to conduct a larger scale study with more science activities. The repertoire of science activities can become resources for Singapore preschool and primary teachers. The research findings will become resources for us to conduct teacher professional development courses for teachers so that they may learn how to use the science activities in their own classrooms. The intellectual merit of this study is that it contributes to the existing early childhood science education literature which is mostly based in western contexts and does not contain any studies about Singapore students at these grade levels. The broader impact of this study is that can provide empirical evidence showing the importance of science education at early childhood/primary levels to local science educators and policy makers.

Children's Literature, especially the fairy tales which are full of fantasy and hyperbolic nature have been enjoyed for centuries and their influence lasting. The stories also reflect the values and ethics a culture and society intend to pass down on the next generation. It is observed that there exist common themes across different cultures. In some cases, there are even similar stores being told in different parts of the world. It would be interesting and worthy to investigate and research on these similar stories. Furthermore, even for the stories of similar themes, texts from different cultures and historical periods, appeared different in their storytelling, literary presentation, rhetoric devices etc. The current project attempt to examine and compare children stories from both East and West, from different cultures and historical periods. The classics children stories (the Cinderella story for example) would be the main focus. The purpose of the current research is that through comparing the similarities and/or differences of the stories to find the diverse values, concepts, cultural and socio-historical displays in those versions of a master story, to further acquire a deeper understanding of literary texts from a broader cultural, historical, and literary perspectives.

The Ministry of Education (MoE) in Singapore has recently implemented the Curriculum 2015 (C2015) which focuses on the Desired Outcomes of Education (DoE), embodied in the “Confident Person”, “Self-directed Learner”, “Active Contributor”, and “Concerned Citizen”. A new curricular initiative, Citizenship and Character Education (CCE), emphasizes the integrative nature of citizenship and 21st century competencies to bring about the DoEs, was implemented in schools in 2011. A fundamental assumption exists amongst policy makers that education policy will, when translated to school contexts, be implemented faithfully by teachers. But teachers at the institutional levels are not mere passive receivers and implementers of policy decisions. Citizenship is value-laden, and its meanings are varied and contested. Invariably, citizens in the same state will understand citizenship differently. This mixed methods study investigates (a) teachers’ conception of good citizenship, and (b) conditions that will have implications for good citizenship pedagogies.

To date, several computerized diagnostic systems have been developed. These systems are limited in their feedback delivery and assessment scopes as well as in the delivery of remedial programs. For example, the Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) developed by the University of Auckland and the Diagnostic English Language Assessment (DELA) designed by the University of Melbourne function primarily like placement tests where feedback is delivered to the learners but the tests aim to place students in different language learning programs (of course, one could argue that this is the treatment that follows the diagnosis, albeit not highly differentiated at the individual level.). Similarly, the Diagnostic English Language Tracking Assessment (DELTA) designed by Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Diagnostic Language Assessment (DIALANG) produced by Lancaster University provide feedback to learners but without specifying skill mastery profiles, differentiated remedial programs, or actionable plans (Harding, Alderson, & Brunfaut, 2015). These systems are also limited by their inability to provide fine-grained information on learners’ growth over time.