Tan, Aik-Ling

To foster students’ learning of critical-thinking skills, we incorporated ill-structured problems in a Human Diseases module for third-year Life Sciences students. Using a problem-solving rubric and working in groups of three, students attempted to solve problems presented to them. We mediated their discussions by asynchronous online discussion forums (AODFs) as part of mass customisation of learning for 40 students where personalised learning was constrained by structure of the module. We examined the quality of students’ discussion, focusing on the feedback group members provided to one another, using an interpreted Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy to code students’ feedback. Our analysis indicated that the students were able to provide uni-structural and multi-structural level in relation to solving an ill-structured problem, even though they are not used to solving ill-structured problems. This indicated that in a mid-size class, while personalised-learning is not always easy, it is possible to mass customise learning for students using common ill-structured problems in a class by mediating problem-solving using student discussions as feedback. However, more can be done to scaffold peer feedback on solving ill-structured problems so that the level of collaborative-learning can be improved in a mass customised model that approaches personalised learning.

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.

Researchers such as Becher, 1989; Pantin, 1968 and McDonald, 1994 in the field of disciplinarity focus on the differences between different disciplines. These researchers describe the variation of knowledge, skills and epistemological difference across different disciplines. Pantin (1968) extended the idea of disciplinarity beyond different disciplines to look into disciplinarity within a single discipline. Science is a discipline that has variation within itself and Pantin focuses on the differences between the sciences.

Set in Singapore, where the dominant pedagogy is teacher-centered and routinised, (Luke, Cazden, Lin & Freebody, 2005), this study tracks two teachers and two classes of students in Singapore to examine the subject of biology. Biology is a subject within the discipline of science and this study examines specifically the variations in interaction for two topics within biology, namely Reproduction in Plants and Ecology. The variation in interaction for this is further tracked in two different settings of the school: the classroom and the school science laboratory. The beliefs of teachers about the subject matter are also described and triangulated with the interactions that are observed in the two settings. The study that I reported here is qualitative in nature and uses tools of interview and analysis of classroom talk to establish the relationship between teachers’ beliefs about the subject matter and the interaction that results. This study seeks to address the following research questions:

A. What interactional features are evident in the teaching and learning of secondary biology as reflected in transcripts of classrooms?

B. What are the similarities and differences in the ways knowledge is realised relating to contrasts of setting and topic: in the classroom versus the laboratory and around the topics of Reproduction in Plants versus Ecology?

C. How do teachers describe and explain the distinctive demands of teaching and learning in biology?

Interviews and transcript analysis are used as methods of data analysis in this thesis. Transcripts are analysed by using principles of Conversation Analysis (ten Have, 1999 and Freebody, 2003) to illuminate the patterns of talk in the classroom and laboratory. The turn-taking structures, the building of exchanges and also the power relations are examined in the classroom and the laboratory for the two different topics. The beliefs of the teachers are elicited through a semi- structured interview that is analysed using paired contrasts and Membership Categorisation Principles (Freebody, 2003 and McHoul and Watson, 1984). From the interview and classroom talk, teacher knowledge in biology is also examined through the lenses of Bernstein and Lyotard. Such analysis is important in two ways. Firstly, it presents contrasting views through which interaction in the classroom and laboratory can be analyzed and understood. Secondly, it provides empirical evidence for existing theories in a local context.

The results of this study revealed that teachers believed that the syllabus and schemes of work for the subject dictated how they conducted their lessons and that they believed that Reproduction in Plants with its specialised vocabulary was highly classified and requires direct teacher transmission of content to the students Ecology on the other hand, with its weakly classified content allows for more student participation in the selection and learning of content. Analysis of classroom interactions reveals that turn-taking was tightly controlled by the teacher, with consensus being constructed generally using IRE sequences with cooperation from the students which usually occurs at the expense of student criticism and questioning. For laboratory sessions, interactions when Reproduction in Plants was taught were found to allow more student- initiated questions but the pattern modelled by the teacher of focusing on rule and convention compliance limited the type of questions asked by the students. During the Ecology unit, interactions during the fieldtrip where teacher control was greatly reduced were found to be less regulated and more spontaneous. The conclusions of the study are that using the lenses of theories of discourse and power were useful in increasing the understanding of ‘interaction’ in classrooms and school science laboratory and how they were similar or different across the two topics.

This study is of value as a micro-analysis of transcripts of a secondary biology laboratory and classroom and offers insights into the beliefs of teachers and how these get translated into classroom practices. This thesis also describes how the interaction in the laboratory and classroom is orchestrated in a principled manner by teachers and students for different topics in different settings. This study is new in the following respects:

A. The analysis is of the similarities and contrasts within a single field of disciplinary knowledge.

B. It documents the relationship between classroom practices and laboratory practices, showing how different kinds of work shape different kinds of interactional opportunities for learning.

C. It documents how science teachers account for differences of discipline, setting and topic.

D. It relates the accounts expressed in interviews and classroom practices.

Biological knowledge for citizenship rests at the nexus of two important concepts -scientific literacy and citizenship education. Scientific literacy, the ability to make sense of and hence decisions related to scientific issues, operates under the broad construct of citizenship. Citizenship education is defined by UNESCO as "educating children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in decisions concerning society". As society moves further into the 21st century, many of the challenges facing 'sustainable societies' require scientifically literate citizens to participate at multiple societal levels. At the international level, many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the world community have a scientific grounding in biology. This suggests that global citizenship education must take cognizance of biological knowledge. Through the theoretical lens of scientific literacy, pressing biological issues of food security, nutrition, biodiversity decline, and climate change are discussed in the chapter, making explicit the importance of biological knowledge for responsible global citizenship. These issues affect citizens at the community and individual levels through decisions linked to matters like food waste, diet, body mass index, and choice of food. Various learning approaches have been used to incorporate these matters into science curricula, such as through real-world learning.

The nature and purposes of science education in Singapore have been, for a long time, an area of debate and concern. Ask teachers, curriculum developers, policy makers, science education researchers, scientists or students about the nature and purpose of science education, you will undoubtedly receive many different answers. The issue of interest here is the understanding of what nature and purposes of science education are among some teachers and students in Singapore. In this paper, we problematize the notion that high school students can think and should be able to think like a scientist. We hope that the discussion generated in this paper will contribute to an increased awareness among teachers and researchers about the issues relating to the nature of school science, learning science and the practices in the science classroom. This study examines two students from a class of 23 girls and their perception of what science is together with their biology teacher in a secondary school. In one of the classroom transcripts, the teacher reminded the students several times to ‘think like a scientist!”. This prompted us to question if the assumption that everyone knows how a scientist operate is valid. In this paper, we attempt to use Membership Categorisation Analysis (Freebody, 2003; McHoul and Watson, 1984) to provide insights into some ideas about science which the teacher and two students from the same school community have explicated. Their interview transcripts constitute the main data source in this paper. The results of this study revealed the complexities of issues relating to the introduction of the notion of nature of scientific enterprise in the secondary biology classrooms.

"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].

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.