Wong Lung Hsiang

Peer assessment has been employed as an effective learning strategy to enhance cognitive practices such as problem-solving and reflection practices. A case study was conducted to explore the effects of online peer assessment as a learning strategy of computational thinking among pre-service teachers. The peer comments were analysed and coded by adopting a coding scheme of comments to investigate the significance of the peer-reviewing process in facilitating the learning of computational thinking. Each student was required to design a lesson by integrating the computational thinking facets into their lesson plan. Upon submitting the lesson plan to the instructor, they were engaged in a blind review process. The students worked in a group to review and provide constructive comments on their peers’ lesson plans. By adapting a peer-reviewing cognitive process model, this article provides evidence that the peer-reviewing process played a critical role in facilitating the learning of Computational Thinking. The findings indicate that the peer assessment strategy can develop preservice teachers’ problem-solving competencies. It was suggested that all students be informed about the purposes and learning benefits of the peer-review process to optimise the learning outcomes.

This symposium proposes a genre of learning designs called Student-Generated Ideas (SGIs), based on designing learning contexts that promote students as critical producers, distributors, and consumers of knowledge. SGIs place students’ ideas at the center of learning designs, considering the learning process as well as the learning goals/outcomes. By soliciting and foregrounding students’ diversified ideas in the classroom and beyond, the learning environment communicates to students that their ideas matter to others and that they have a position of responsibility to their own and their peers’ learning processes. The notion of SGIs is embodied in a repertoire of studies at the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, that offer varied yet overlapping interpretations of how student ideas can inform the design of learning contexts. In sharing the core design principles for SGIs approaches, this work contributes important components to the learning sciences discipline and changing educational practice.

The aim of this study is explore the writing performance effect of a collaborative writing approach mediated by a computer-assisted collaborative learning tool for elementary school students. To increase students "interest and performances in Chinese essay writing, we facilitated co-writing peer learning programs are executed on Tablet PCs with Group Scribbles software for students" practicing themes about Taiwan with VSPOW (Vocabularies → Sentences → Paragraphs → Outlines → essay Writing) writing model. Through the peer collaborations, the pooling of rich vocabularies and corpus, and face-to-face discussions, the students‟ motivation and quality of writing had been enhanced.

This paper outlines an eclectic approach to assist juvenile Chinese as second language (L2) pupils in Singapore in developing linguistic-related micro-skills for writing. The recursive, bottom-up writing process requires the pupils to collaboratively carry out “word/phrase pooling”, “sentence making”, “paragraph writing” and “outlining” on wiki, and eventually composing their essays individually. The intention is to fill up the gap between the current-traditional product-oriented approach and the more cognitively demanding processoriented approach, that is, juvenile L2 learners' limited linguistic and cognitive skills that would hinder them from writing proper essays, not to mention carrying out process writing. The results of our pilot study show that the target pupils' micro-skills for writing were improved significantly due to emergent peer coaching. There is also an implication that through such peer coaching activities, the perceived challenge of pupils' individual differences in linguistic proficiency could be turned into an advantage for motivating pupils' collaboration in learning.

Design research has been the major methodology when learning sciences researchers design and implement interventions to bring education change in schools. However, how to promote systematic and sustainable change in design research remains a big challenge. The study is part of a three-year project that brought a seamless learning innovation to transform primary three (P3) and four science learning. During the first year enactment, we had one teacher and one P3 experimental class. We followed the same teacher and class to Primary four. Another teacher and experimental class joined the project at P4. Audio/video recordings of teacher-researcher weekly meetings, research team weekly meeting minutes, selected audio/video recordings of science lessons and field notes, teacher reflection and interview audios, and student artefacts were collected over about three years of time. We identified teacher to be the major agency for sustainable education change. We apply a Structure/Agency framework and a teacher qualification model when describing and analyzing teacher learning and teacher change during the seamless learning project. Our results showed teacher knowledge, belief, and practice change was facilitated and constrained by the school environment and the change was not of the same pace and synchronized but affected by each other. The paper provides empirical data and analytical framework for teacher change in design research context.

Computer-based modeling is not just a means for students to learn important scientific knowledge and skills, but also a technique to assess student understandings of science. A software tool called Model-It allows young students to create their own models so that their learning becomes more interactive and engaged. However, there is a mismatch between how students learn and how they are assessed if conventional paper-administered tests are used. This paper argues for alternative assessments to be better aligned with curriculum and instruction. Forty 4th grade students in a local Singapore school participated in a science inquiry activity that involved learning with modeling as an alternative assessment. The students individually created models of food webs to illustrate their understanding of energy flows and photosynthesis. A scoring rubric based on four criteria (“focus and structure”, "accuracy", "completeness" and "functionality") was used to evaluate the models, with the modeling scores being compared to student scores of the school’s paper-based assessments of science learning. In addition, 18 students were interviewed about their understanding of models and modeling. The data is currently being analyzed and the findings of this study and potential implications for educational assessments will be presented in this paper.

This paper reports on a study to investigate the effects of collaborative concept mapping in a one-device-per-student (1:1) digital learning environment, as compared with one-device-to-many-students (1:m), in terms of students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention, quality of the concept maps, interactional patterns, and learning perceptions. Guided by the methodology of quasi-experimental research, we adopted Group Scribbles (GS) 1.0 in our empirical study where students carried out collaborative concept mapping activities in two different settings: (a) students working in pairs with one Tablet PC assigned to each of them; (b) multiple students sharing a Tablet PC. In particular, we investigated the students' learning process, identified and compared various interactional patterns exhibited by the student groups who were engaged in both settings, and discussed how such group dynamics might have affected the quality of the student artifacts produced by individual groups.

This paper proposes and examines a design of technological scaffolding for cooperative learning. An application for learning fractions with handheld devices was designed and tested in a primary three classroom. The outcomes were interpreted according to a two-dimensional framework consisting of the cooperative learning principles (maximum peer interaction, equal opportunity to participate, individual accountability and positive interdependence) and the observed interplay of social, technological and teacher scaffolding which emerged throughout the activity. The focus of our analysis is the technological scaffolding and the support it can give to cooperative learning activities based on the feedback received from two sources: primary school children using the software and a group of teachers trying out and reflecting on our design.

This paper reports on the effects of two different dynamic grouping strategies in a mobile-assisted Chinese character learning game. The game application assigns each student a component of a Chinese character through their smartphones and requires them to form groups that can assemble a legitimate Chinese character using the components held by the group members. Sixteen Primary 3 (3rd grade) students taking Chinese as a second language (L2) class involved in the study. Video-recordings of the game and the transcriptions of focus group interviews were qualitatively analyzed. The study aims to explore the patterns of social interactions during the game, especially on the varied impacts of the two different grouping rules (allowing versus not allowing each student to join more than one group at one time) on the students' game behaviors and their learning gains.