Yan Yaw Kai

This Report describes the design and implementation of a curriculum that promotes active learning for an Honours module on organometallic chemistry at the National Institute of Education. An integrated, thematic, and interactive approach to the design and implementation of the curriculum was adopted. In this approach, the principles of thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, and chemical bonding theory were employed to explain the reactions of various types of organometallic compounds, which in turn form the basis for the understanding of the main theme of the module, transition-metalcatalysed organic reactions. The opinions of the students on how the module should and should not be taught were gathered before the commencement of the module and these were taken into account during curriculum design and implementation. The instructional strategies employed were interactive and collaborative, and opportunities for the practice of high-level thinking skills were provided. The students responded positively and enthusiastically to the above efforts to promote active learning in the module.

In this paper, we discuss our efforts in curriculum development of an environmental science module that will be conducted in a networked teaching and learning environment, complemented by laboratory sessions and field work. The aim of the curriculum is to promote collaborative and distributed learning of environmental science that emphasizes the acquisition of higher order thinking skills. Some aspects of the curriculum that will be highlighted include the contents of an interactive multimedia teaching system for self-paced learning, and scenario generators that allow the participants to experiment with hypothetical environmental situations.

Play has an important role throughout childhood as children learn and develop through engaging in play. The aim of this study was to examine how purposeful play can be used to introduce and facilitate the learning of science ideas and scientific skills in young children in the Singapore context. Science activities were carried out with preschool children aged 5 to 6 through the use of purposeful play, and the video and audio recordings of the science activities were analysed using qualitative coding methods to identify the science learning that took place while engaging in purposeful play. The coded data were written into narratives to illustrate the process and learning outcomes of the science activities conducted using purposeful play. The findings of this study indicate that young children are able to display science process skills and learn science ideas through engaging in purposeful play.

The learning and studying approach of NIE students was studied using the Bigg' s Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ). Results showed that the SPQ is a good instrument with good psychometric properties for studying the three approaches to learning namely: surface, deep and achieving approaches. Students in NIE generally adopt deep approaches more than surface approaches to their learning. Focused interviews were used as follow-up procedures to further probe into their learning and studying behaviour. Students indicated that the teaching and learning process, the assessment mode and the learning environment all contributed to their approaches to learning and studying.

This paper concerns curriculum redesign for active learning in two chemistry courses at the National Institute of Education. The redesign involves mainly the re-structuring of content to emphasise the essential knowledge. Teaching strategies, learner activities, and instructional media that facilitate student engagement with the course material and encourage the adoption of scientific reasoning and problem-solving approaches are also suggested. In addition, changes in the mode of assessment of the courses that reflect the new foci of the curricula are proposed.

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.