Caleon, Imelda S.

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.

This investigation involves two studies that were carried out to augment the extant literature on the effectiveness of teacher-implemented positive psychology interventions (PPIs). The studies sought to provide preliminary evidence on the potential benefits of two PPIs on students with different levels of academic ability, which was based on their academic achievement as they entered secondary school. The student participants in the Express or Normal Academic streams were categorised as the “academically more able” group and those in the Normal Technical stream were categorised as the “academically challenged” group.
Study 1 focused on assessing the impact of the Gratitude PPI while Study 2 zoomed in on the effectiveness of the Hope PPI. The participants in Study 1 were Secondary Three students from the Express (n=63) and NT (n=52) streams in one school. For Study 2, the participants were two classes of Secondary Two students (n=79) from the NA stream in one school and one class of Secondary One students from the NT Stream in another school (n=30). Study 1 followed the quasi-experimental design whereby each of the two classes from the same stream were assigned as the experimental or control group. Study 2 involved the split-plot experimental design whereby students in each class were randomly assigned to the experimental or control group. In each study, all of the participating students were asked to complete the same survey questionnaire a week before, and then one week and four to eight weeks after experiencing the assigned intervention (i.e., Gratitude or Hope PPI) or control activities (i.e., Citizenship and Character Education lessons). The Gratitude PPI was implemented by trained class teachers in five 30-minute sessions over 10 weeks; the Hope PPI was implemented in six 50-minute sessions spread over six weeks. The control activities were implemented at the same time as the pertinent PPI activities.

The results of the study suggest that the effects of the Gratitude and Hope PPIs did not significantly differ across ability groups. Both academically more able and academically challenged students were found to draw benefits from the PPIs in terms of preventing the decrease in positive emotions (i.e., gratitude or hope) and increase in ill-being (i.e., depressive symptoms). The Hope PPI was found to be useful in improving academic outcomes, such as the use of deep learning strategies, and maintaining moderate levels of intrinsic motivation. The Gratitude PPI was found to be effective in promoting positive relationship with teachers and friends; it can also help cultivate school resilience, which is a disposition linked to effectively handling stressors associated with performing school tasks. The students’ written feedback suggests the benefits of the Hope PPI in the social, emotional and cognitive realms. For the Gratitude PPI, the academically more able students showed greater engagement in the activities than the academically challenged students did. For the Hope PPI, the academically challenged students seem to have appreciated and recognised the importance of the hope activities more than the academically more able students did.

Towards gaining a better understanding of the field of the Learning Sciences, this research investigates the research trends over 10 years. It also compares the Learning Sciences with the closely related academic fields of Educational Technology and Educational Psychology. A content analysis is performed on 5187 journal articles drawing from 12 top journals from 2003 to 2012. This content analysis was semi-automated and guided by an initial theoretical frame. The results reveal that research trends in the Learning Sciences have remained largely consistent except in the area of individual differences and affect, which has increased over the years. Key strengths of Learning Sciences include research on small group learning, inquiry, problem solving, argumentation, and mixed-methods. As the LS reflects on its state of practice, it should recognize that the field has achieved many research distinctives, yet, there are several opportunities for further research growth.

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.

This study reports on the development, validation and application of a four-tier multiplechoice (4TMC) diagnostic instrument, which has not been reported in the literature. Each 4TMC item has a stem that is followed by the content tier, reason tier, and confidence tiers. The content tier and reason tier measure a respondent’s content knowledge and explanatory knowledge, respectively. The confidence tiers separately measure a respondent’s confidence in the correctness of his or response for the content tier and reason tier. The 4TMC test focused on waves, and was accordingly named the Wave Diagnostic Instrument (WADI). Using several indicators, the reliability of WADI was found to be low to moderate for the content and reason tiers, and moderate to high for the confidence tiers. The validity of inferences about students’ conceptions on waves that were derived from scores on WADI was fair to moderate.

The participants of the study were 931 upper secondary students from the Express and Special stream of 11 co-educational mainstream government schools. They took WADI after they were formally instructed on waves. Mean scores and mean confidence for the content tier were higher than those for the reason tier. The vast majority of the respondents were found to have an inadequate grasp of the topics tested. The students’ mean confidence was slightly above the neutral level. The students who have higher scores in WADI tended to have higher confidence levels (r=.28 to .35, p<.0001), and to have higher academic achievement (r=.28 to .43, p<.001). The students’ academic achievement was found to be weakly correlated with their confidence and confidence bias. The confidence levels of the males were statistically higher than those of the females (t> 4.61, p<.0001), but the test scores of both gender groups were found to be comparable. Confidence and test performance tended to increase when students are familiar with (i.e., formally instructed about) the concepts tested (t>2.95, p<.004).

The students were generally overconfident (i.e., their mean confidence level was beyond what was warranted by the accuracy of their responses), with males tending to be more overconfident than the females. The ability of students to discriminate between what they know and what they do not know, in terms of confidence, was low and was not significantly affected by their academic achievement and gender.

Fifty-eight alternative conceptions (ACs) were expressed by at least 10% of the sample, of which 24 were espoused confidently. Thirteen ACs were applied by more than 50% of the sample at least once. Seven ACs were expressed with high confidence, with the highest confidence being associated with ACs about the role of air in sound propagation and the graphical representation of waves. Six of the nine ACs that were associated with more than one item of WADI were found to be consistently applied by at least 10% of the sample; of these six ACs, two were consistently applied with confidence by at least 10% of the sample.

The students’ confidence ratings obtained using the 4TMC version of WADI was found to be statistically higher than those obtained using a content parallel three-tier version (which requires one confidence rating for both content tier and reason tier responses) of WADI (t=2.83, p<.05).

The attitudes towards science of gifted as compared to mainstream students have not yet been explored in the Singapore context. As attitudes towards science are very much associated with achievement and future decisions on the part of the students, and particularly useful in conceptualizing innovations for teachers and curriculum developers, this investigation was undertaken to determine whether differences in such attitudes exists between gifted and non-gifted students (divided into EMI and EM2 streams) and between boys and girls. A total of 653 upper primary students from co-educational government and government-aided schools were involved in this study. The attitude subscales included were enjoyment of science, appreciation of the social implications of science and preference for science careers. Using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), it was found that gender and ability had significant effects on all the three attitude subscales, but gender and ability interaction was significant only on the first two subscales. Boys, in general, had more positive views about science than girls. Overall, the gifted and EM 1 students had comparable attitudes towards science; both of them consistently showed more positive attitudes than EM2 students. Such general findings were also mirrored in career preference subscale results. Gifted and EM1 boys viewed science as more enjoyable and as having more importance in society than EM2 students. Girls from different ability groups had similar views on enjoyment of science, but differences on perceptions of the social implications of science were prominent among EM 1 and EM2 girls.