Tan, Aik-Ling

"Science education research is important for continued success in science achievements in Singapore. The current science education research landscape in Singapore is diverse and lacks a consolidated framework through which science education can be examined. As such, this pilot study hopes to reveal some areas in which science education research efforts can focus on to ensure continued innovation and achievements in science."-- [p. 1] of executive summary.

This study examines the epistemic discourse and the understanding of epistemology of teachers teaching general science at the lower secondary level. The secondary science curriculum in Singapore is designed in a spiral manner and is written as outcomes statements. These outcomes focuses on the content of science that students are expected to learn at the end of each school year. In secondary schools, science teachers are trained as specialists in various sub-disciplines of science such as biology, chemistry, and physics. These specialist science teachers can potentially be deployed to teach lower secondary science that is designed as general science with all the three sub-disciplines coming together to form one subject. As such, biology-trained teachers will have to teach chemistry and physics, while physics-trained teachers will also have to teach biology and chemistry. Anecdotally, this has resulted in some levels of discomfort as teachers are uncertain of scientific content that they are not trained in. These practical difficulties experienced by teachers teaching general science seemed to concur with the theoretical idea that while all the three sub-disciplines of science falls under the large umbrella of science, there are subtle but important differences among them. Based on Biglan’s (1973) ideas of disciplinarity, while academic subjects are classified into categories of similar ways of thinking, there remained degrees of differences between these categories. This is because the sub-disciplines of sciences, from biology (soft) to physics (hard), give different emphasis to what constitute evidence and placed different prominence on the use of specialized vocabularies. The differences between knowledge structure in biology, chemistry and physics can also be viewed from a sociological perspective. In Bernstein’s (1999) ideas of horizontal and vertical discourses, biology show more features of a discipline that has more traits of everyday local knowledge with more diffused vocabularies while physics is characterized by specialised knowledge and vocabularies.

This project sits at the nexus of pedagogies and human physiological changes during learning. Recent evidences from neuroscience research suggest that there exist intricate relationships between affect and learning. In the proposal, affect include emotions, moods, and emotional climates. Emotions are intense, short lived, and highly conscious affective states that typically have a salient cause and great deal of cognitive content whereas moods are relatively low-intensity, diffuse, and enduring affective states that have no salient antecedent cause and there little cognitive content. (Forgas, 2001, p.15) Emotional climate refers to the collective state of emotional communion among students in a class (Tobin et al. 2013). Stress pertaining to emotions of fear, anger and disgust (Lerner, Gonzalez, Dahl, Hariri, & Taylor, 2007) is one of the affect that is experienced during learning. Stress has been implicated as one of the major contributor to depression, anxiety and heart diseases. An individual's response to stressful situation varies and hence identifying and understanding stressful situations during learning can serve to improve students' learning experiences. Beyond the traditional methods of using self-reported psychometric instruments (such as questionnaires and interviews) to assess stressful situations, technologies can provide critical in-the-moment information about individual physiological changes during learning. Relevant technologies include analysis of facial and/or audio expressions of a person, and biometrics such as oximetry to measure pulse rate and blood oxygen level. These technologies afford both real time analysis of data for instant visualization of information, as well as a record of the information for review after the instructional or learning event.

This report details the three keys aspects of the project ─ (a) the ideas and motivation of teachers to carry out inquiry, (b) students ideas about science learning in school, and (c) factors that could enhance science teacher professional development to carry out inquiry. In elementary science classrooms, we showed that: (1) while teachers express moderate to strong intention to teach science through inquiry they are constrained by numerous components in their classroom context, including goals of instruction, curriculum integration, learning environment, lesson strategies, student disposition and teacher disposition; (2) students value hands-on and collaborative experiences for learning science, suggesting a pedagogy characterized by clear learning goals and valuing a sense of community among learners; and (3) further training should focus on how to, more than why, teach through inquiry, adopting a paradigm that is responsive to different contexts.

"This pilot project investigated the implementation, development and improvement of Science Practical Assessment (SPA) skills at secondary level in Singapore. The researchers profiled and critically examined existing science laboratory practices; collaborated in the planning and prototyping of pedagogic tools for teachers to use in designing and adapting instructional materials for SPA; and evaluated novel teaching, learning and assessment practices towards SPA skill development."-- [p. 1].

"The objectives of this study are: 1. To describe the perceptions and dilemmas of science inquiry held by both pre-service and in-service elementary teachers; and 2. To characterise the process of enhancing the understandings of inquiry while developing and examining scenario-based inquiry materials".--page 8.

Subcultures emerge from within dominant and mainstream cultures, and can exert influence on the outcomes of science teaching and learning. This is an explanatory study about the subcultures of Singapore lower track science classrooms with the aim to understand the sets of understandings, behaviours and artefacts used by lower progress students in the Normal Academic streams, and diffused through interlocking group networks. We want to look for explanations on how: (1) cultural elements in these science classrooms become widespread in a population, (2) local variations in cultural content exists in group settings, and (3) subculture changes dynamically. By applying the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction to generate explanations that provide substantive knowledge on how the lower progress students learn and their science teachers teach science. The methods of data collection in this critical ethnographic study will include lesson videos, intensive student interviews, teacher interviews, observations and conversations with students in informal school settings, and documentation of artefacts. Data analysis including speech act and facework analyses will be used to unpack the performativity of the students and teachers in the science classrooms and illuminate the negotiations of power relationships, collective and individual memberships and space that in turn, affect students' identification with or against the subcultures and their subsequent contributions to it. This study will contribute to the cultural sociology studies of science education, as there are limited (if any) empirical studies that discuss the existence of subcultures in educational contexts. The findings will offer to science teacher insights that illuminate the complex and dynamic forces that interplay with their science teaching, so that they can understand and work with, rather than against them.

"This pilot research study aims to help science educators gain an insight into the state of science learning in a high school through the lens of the philosophy of science and the ethics of science. The following research questions guide this research: 1. What are the learning processes which take place in a class, which aim to bring across the nature of science? 2. To what extent is the philosophy of science translated to actual classroom practice in school science? 3. What are students' perceptions of science after an education in science which aims to bring out the nature of scientific knowledge? "-- [p. 1] of executive summary.