Tan Geok Chin, Ivy

"Preparing teachers for the 21st century era entails cognizance of the changing nature of knowledge, learning and environments. New models of knowledge building and knowledge co-creation are emerging. Personalised learning takes on new dimensions with mobile devices and new tools for sharing and meta-thinking. In teacher development, evidences from research point to the importance of teacher reflection on practice, collaborative sharing and feedback through peer and expert mentoring."

The main purpose of this study is to gather baseline data on the level of environmental knowledge, attitudes and behavior of secondary and junior college students in Singapore. For this purpose, an instrument of fifty-five items was designed and tested on a sample of 1 256 secondary students (grade 9) and junior college year one (grade 11) students.

The students' mean environmental knowledge score was 70.9%. The mean correct response rates for the environmental fact, concept and generalisation subtests were 68.0%, 68.8% and 78.0% respectively. The mean environmental attitude and behaviour scores were 66.0% and 70.5% respectively. A stronger correlation was found between environmental knowledge and attitudes (r = 0.41, p < .01) than behaviour (r = 0.26, p < .01). A lower but significant correlation was also found between environmental attitudes and behavior (r = 0.27, p = .01).

When investigating the students' main source of environmental information, it was found that the students indicated that they gained most of the environmental knowledge from out-of-school sources than from general education at a school. Majority of the students (53.7%) indicated that they gathered most of their environmental information from the printed media (newspaper and magazines) as well as the electronic media (radio and television). Only 30.75% of the students indicated that general education at school was their main source of environmental information.

The students' perception of the most serious environmental problems in the world and locally was quite different. They perceived that ozone depletion and global warming were the two most serious environmental problems in the world whilst locally, the two most serious environmental responsibility, 90% of the students indicated that everybody should be responsible for the protection of the environment.

Eighteen hypotheses were tested at p <0.01 level of significance to find out the relationships between the dependent variables and the independent variables (educational level, gender, course, ethnicity and house type). Out of these, seven revealed significant differences. Educational level and secondary three course type were found to have significant effects on environmental knowledge and scores. As for environmental behavior, the independent variables which were found to have significant effects were gender, secondary three course type and house type.

Climate change is taught explicitly as a topic in the Singapore school geography curriculum. In responding to the city state’s desired outcomes of education and meeting its standards of twenty-first century competencies, it is important for learners to develop criticality and dispositions to engage climate change issues. Based on previous studies conducted by the PI over the last four years, it has been found that geography students have misconceptions about this topic that are similar to those found in other students around the world. In reviewing the literature on methodologies that examine how best geography can be learned, the Learning Progression (LP) approach offers an empirics-based roadmap for building students’ holistic knowledge base and in confronting the fragmented and often incomplete understanding of the climate change issue. The study endeavours to answer the key question of how school geography curriculum can be designed for learning about climate change and how it can be enacted in the classroom based on the outcomes of this research study. The methodology is adapted from the common practice of establishing a hypothetical learning progression (HLP), testing and validating the HLP to develop the empirical learning progression (ELP) before determining intervention strategies to test if students can learn climate change better through this approach. The findings will contribute towards the curriculum design and development of the climate change topic, offer a case study in geography teaching and learning informed by the OER’s instructional core model, provide opportunities for evidenced-informed delivery of NIE’s pre-service and in-service programmes on geography education, and foster deeper professional collaborations between NIE, MOE-HQ and schools. More importantly, the research study will inform the teaching and learning of climate change within the wider context of geographical and environmental education in the international community.

An experiment conducted in Singapore secondary schools sought to evaluate the effects of the Group Investigation method of cooperative learning versus the effects of the traditional whole-class method of instruction on students' academic achievement and on their motivation to learn. The study also investigated the students' perceptions of the Group Investigation method.

Seven secondary two classes (grade 8, age 14) from two schools participated in the experiment. A total of 241 students were taught in either the Group Investigation method (n = 138) or the whole-class method (n =l 03). All the classes studied two similar curricular units in Geography and for the same number of hours per week for six weeks.

The two independent variables of the study were two methods of instruction (Group Investigation versus whole-class method of instruction) and two levels of student achievement (high-achievers versus low-achievers). Three sets of data were collected: students' academic achievement, their intrinsic motivation to learn and their written perceptions of the Group Investigation method. Students' academic achievement was measured by combining their scores from two Geography curricular unit tests given during the intervention period. The students' intrinsic motivation to learn was measured by using a twenty-five-item questionnaire about students' intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation to learn. Finally, at the end of the experiment, students who studied in the Group Investigation classrooms were asked to write about their perceptions of the Group Investigation method. The students' written statements were then coded, categorized and analysed.

Students in the Group Investigation method and whole- class instruction advanced in their achievement to the same extent over the course of the experiment. Therefore, neither method was found to be more effective than the other. The high-achieving students had significantly higher academic achievement compared with the low-achievers, as expected. The Group Investigation method did not have differential effects on the two groups of high- and low-achievers, as had been hypothesized.

Group Investigation was found to affect high-achiever's motivation to learn on the Criteria subscale only, whereas the other scales that measured motivation did not yield any significant differences compared with the scores of the students in the whole class method.

The students' written statements of their perceptions and experience of learning through the Group Investigation method provided interesting insights into their psychology of learning. A total of 955 statements were recorded by the students taught with the Group Investigation method, two-thirds (652) of which were positive statements and one-third (303) were negative statements. The high achievers wrote more statements and also provided longer and more elaborated responses than the low-achievers. Both the high-achieving and low-achieving groups made twice as many positive statements as negative ones.

Four categories of positive statements were identified: One category asserted that the Group Investigation method was interesting, fun and effective, while the other categories reflected the students' positive evaluations of their social relationships, learning skills and academic achievement in terms of deeper understanding of the topics investigated.

On the negative side, students stated that they would like the teacher to continue with their normal teaching method, that is, to present academic material to them. The students thought that the Group Investigation method was time consuming and they were concerned about their forthcoming examinations and syllabus coverage. Another cluster of statements was about their inability to learn as much from the new method of learning. Students said that they encountered some problems while working in groups, such as how to conduct their research and how to make their presentations.

One approach to the interpretation of the results obtained in this study is to take into consideration the organizational environment and norms prevailing in Singapore schools, and the limitations these impose on the implementation and practice of the Group Investigation method. It is suggested that the results that emerged here could be understood only in light of environmental constraints operating in the school and classroom that have moulded students' attitudes and orientations toward learning over their years of schooling.

Information Technology is commonly referred to by its acronym IT. But just what does IT encompass and what are the "technologies" of IT that are useful for learning? How will IT enrich a lesson and enable learning? In particular, the question of how different the advent of new ITs such as the World Wide Web (WWW) is from existing ITs such as the video or TV will be examined. Since learning arises from a constructive process of reflection on the material provided and interaction with it, the mere use of IT in lessons may not be a sufficient condition for learning to occur. It may not even be a necessary condition for learning to occur. Furthermore, IT refers to an extremely varied spectrum of "technologies" ranging from plain electronic manifestation of printed material to self-contained, highly interactive, communication-enabled and multi-mediated materials. There exists a problem on the choice of IT for learning. Examples will be drawn from the comparative study of two University Geography courses, one pre-service and one in-service, on the infusion of interactive online web-based courses to enable learning.

Geography has been one of the core humanities subjects in schools in Singapore. It has undergone several national curriculum reviews through over six decades. School geography started with the regional approach in the 1960s where the curriculum focused on pure description of the physical and human geographies within specific countries. This lead to much rote memorization of facts in the examinations. Regional geography was then replaced by the systematic approach in the 1980s which placed great emphasis on conceptual teaching and learning. Teaching became less of dissemination of facts and more of connecting concepts and generalizations. In 2013, there was yet another significant geography curriculum change which puts emphasis on the inquiry-based approach to the teaching and learning in order to provide students with deeper and critical understanding of the changing world and help prepare them for the complexities of the world. Geographical inquiry even extends beyond the classrooms into the field and students are required to collect data and investigate authentic geographical issues. This chapter will provide a discussion on these critical changes to the geography curriculum particularly in terms of the geography content, pedagogy and assessment.