Guo Libo

This paper develops an integrative systemic approach to understanding the notion of scaffolding and examines the knowledge domains: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and advanced concepts, teachers’ scaffolding practices around assignments and the quality of student work in the subject of English in 18 Singaporean elementary schools (Primary 5) and 18 high schools (Secondary 3). It is found that: (1). Student work exhibits high levels of factual and procedural knowledge but does not show evidence of advanced concepts; (2). Mediocre task scaffolding contributes to mediocre student work; and (3). Learning environment, i.e., the interpsychological environment must be improved before substantial intrapsychological, individual development (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57) is possible.

This paper reports on work in progress of a large-scale study which seeks to examine and compare knowledge construction and the development of grammatical metaphor in Secondary 3 (Year 9) student writing in English and Social Studies. Through a combination of qualitative (systemic-functional) and quantitative (via computer-supported tool MMAX2) analyses of a sample of 42 student writings, it is shown that arguing in subject English and arguing in Social Studies employ different grammatical resources and point to different directions. Compared with subject English, which employs rankshifted embedding, Social Studies (and its parent disciplines such as History and Sociology) depends to a greater extent on grammatical metaphors to argue. This kind of work can have important implications for developing students’ advanced literacy in that it can deepen our understandings of the textual features of different subject areas and their different underlying value systems.

Educational practice requires teachers to manage the intellectual space surrounding learning in their classrooms. Prototypically, teachers’ decision making involves identifying learning objectives and then organising activities that lead students towards the production of artefacts that demonstrate their understanding of key concepts and information in designated fields of study. However, in practice, there are occasions where teachers’ designs and students’ output are misaligned and this phenomenon usually has a negative impact on students’ levels of achievement. Explaining how and why students’ work fails to meet expectations is a sensitive matter that may not be adequately explained by simplistic deficit models concerning the child. Drawing on data collected as part of CRPP’s Digital Curricular Literacies project, this paper reports preliminary relationships between learning task characteristics (outcomes, strategies, scaffolding), teachers’ process goals (e.g., remember, understand, evaluate) in lower-secondary science and history classrooms and the quality of students’ work. Our subsequent discussion focuses on cases where student underachievement seems to be attributable to imprecision in learning task design and/or inadequate classroom practice. Potential consequences on students’ ability to communicate will be highlighted and suggestions made about scaffolding students’ learning successfully in the completion of ill-structured learning tasks

This paper develops an integrative systemic approach to understanding the notion of scaffolding and examines the knowledge domains: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and advanced concepts, teachers’ scaffolding practices around assignments and the quality of student work in the subject of English in 18 Singaporean elementary schools (Primary 5) and 18 high schools (Secondary 3). It is found that: (1). Student work exhibits high levels of factual and procedural knowledge but does not show evidence of advanced concepts; (2). Mediocre task scaffolding contributes to mediocre student work; and (3). Learning environment, i.e., the interpsychological environment must be improved before substantial intrapsychological, individual development (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57) is possible.

Student success in the 21st century requires not only the mastery of basic classroom-type knowledge and skills but also the ability to engage in higher-order thinking, reasoning, and real-world problem solving. This will enable our students to become productive workers and responsible citizens who can also actively participate in lifelong learning. A number of researchers in the United States and Australia have systematically examined the authentic intellectual quality of the teachers’ assessment tasks/assignments and student work in response to the tasks/assignments (e.g., Newmann & Associates, 1996; Luke et al., 2000; Lingard & Ladwig, 2001). These studies have shown that when teachers design and use highintellectual quality assignments that demand higher-order thinking, in-depth understanding of knowledge, elaborated communication, and making connections to students’ lives beyond school, students produce higher quality intellectual work. This paper reports the preliminary findings from teacher-moderated judgments of written assignments or assessment tasks and student work in Singapore. The teachers’ assignments/assessment tasks and student work were collected from 36 Singaporean schools across four major subject areas: English, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science at the Primary 5 and Secondary 3 levels. Subject-specific panels were formed by a group of experienced teachers. They were trained to understand the authentic intellectual standards and to use the scoring rubrics collaboratively prior to their actual scoring of the teachers’ assignments and student work. The paper will report the outcomes of the statistical comparisons of authentic intellectual quality of the teachers’ assignments and that of related student work across subject areas, grade levels, and streams.

This paper examines the lexicogrammatical realization of the construct of authentic intellectual quality (AIQ) proposed by Koh, Wong, Tan, Guo, Lee, & Lim (2004). Following Newmann and Associates (1996), and Luke et al., (2003), Koh, et al. have argued that student work be assessed on eight standards, including depth of knowledge and understanding, knowledge criticism, and knowledge manipulation. In December 2004, student work in a number of subjects collected from Singapore Primary and Secondary schools were scored by experienced school teachers. This paper draws upon systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and explores how student work which has been assigned a particular set of scores on the AIQ scale is expressed through a particular cluster of lexicogrammatical features. Such analyses will identify the linguistic profiles of student work, provide a link between teacher judgement and its linguistic evidence, and hopefully enhance the capacity and accuracy of automated essay scoring.