Lee, Ngan Hoe

Mathematics education in Singapore is a shared responsibility of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the National Institute of Education (NIE) . The MOE overseas the intended, implemented and attained curriculum in all schools while the NIE is involved in teacher preparation and development and also research in mathematics education. Therefore this report has two sections respectively , the first describes the education system and school mathematics curricula while the second briefly provides relevant information on teacher preparation and development and mathematics education research in Singapore.

This is a workshop on word problems in primary mathematics. The workshop is based on a paper derived from an investigation into children’ responses to standard and non-standard mathematics word problems before and after an intervention programme. Standard word problems can be solved by identifying the correct operation and performing the necessary computation. The story context does not affect the solution. In solving non-standard word problems the story context is important in obtaining a correct solution. Primary Three children in five Singapore schools participated in a year-long intervention where their teachers used several lessons that included non-standard problems. The children were asked to solve standard and non-standard word problems at the start and at the end of the school year. Among these word problems, there were those that were similar to, those that were similar in the mathematical structure to but different in the superficial features from, and those that were different in mathematical structure from the problems in the intervention programme. The responses from four intact classes were selected for analysis. It was found that the children were able to make sense of their computation results. However, in situations that went beyond computation, many children were not able to make sense. Intervention and use of concrete materials were found to encourage sense-making.

A study of school mathematics curriculum enacted by competent teachers in Singapore secondary schools, is a programmatic research project at the National Institute of Education (NIE) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore through the Office of Education Research (OER) at NIE. The main goal of the project is to collect a set of data that would be used by two studies to research the enacted secondary school mathematics curriculum. The project aims to examine how competent experienced secondary school teachers implement the designated curriculum prescribed by the MOE in the 2013 revision of curriculum. It does this firstly by examining the video recordings of the classroom instruction and interactions between secondary school mathematics teachers and their students, as it is these interactions that fundamentally determine the nature of the actual mathematics learning and teaching that take place in the classroom. It also examines content through the instructional materials used – their preparation, use in classroom and as homework. The project comprises a video segment and a survey segment. Approximately 630 secondary mathematics teachers and 600 students are participating in the project. The data collection for the video segment of the project is guided by the renowned complementary accounts methodology while the survey segment adopts a self-report questionnaire approach. The findings of the project will serve several purposes. They will provide timely feedback to mathematics specialists in the MOE, inform pre-service and professional development programmes for mathematics teachers at the NIE and contribute towards articulation of “Mathematics pedagogy in Singapore secondary schools” that is evidence based.