Chang, Chew Hung

This study identified secondary school students’ alternative conceptions (ACs) of climate change and their resistance to instruction. Using a case-based approach, a diagnostic test was administered to Secondary 3 male students in a pre-test and post-test. The ACs identified in the pre-test were on the causes of climate change, the natural greenhouse effect and its properties, the enhancement of the greenhouse effect, the elements involved in heat-trapping and their characteristics. There were also notable ACs on the effects of climate change, mostly on how the phenomenon is related to non-atmospheric events such as tsunami, earthquakes, acid rain and skin cancer. The students confuse the Montreal with the Kyoto Protocol as the primary treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas there was significant improvement in students’ understanding in the post-test, the distribution of responses for each of the ACs showed that the reduction in erroneous responses was not sufficient to reject the ACs fully. The authors recommend that instruction should move beyond patchwork pedagogy to a more explicit acknowledgement, incorporation and direct refutation of misconceived knowledge structures.

In balancing the role of assessment as an integral part of the curriculum and teaching process and that of a measurement and reporting tool, practitioners are often challenged to design good assessment tasks that fulfil these purposes as well as developing cognitive skills and abilities. While there are many research studies on inquiry in fieldwork and on assessment in geography education, there is little recognition on how the whole process of inquiry acts as a form of fieldwork assessment within geographical education. This chapter proposes that inquiry can be a mode of assessment for and as fieldwork and need not be solely administered at the end of fieldwork activities.

For over 30 years, the Southeast Asian Geography Association (SEAGA) has provided a dynamic platform for the exchange of knowledge, research findings, and ideas among academics, policymakers, and educators from Southeast Asia and those working on Southeast Asia. Using Marsden’s (1989) notion of the politicization of geography by significant power groups, this article describes a critical narrative of the key trends, themes, and topics defining scholarly discourse in the community of SEAGA and its potential impact on school geography in the region. For each of the three decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, and 2010-2019), the authors analyzed significant themes and issues for each period. Employing purposive sampling of conference proceedings and topics presented between 1990 and 2017, the authors found the following trends over the years: i) the pluralization and diversification of themes and topics; ii) an increasing interest for cross-thematic studies, and iii) a greater emphasis on sustainability and environmental issues in recent years. Based on these observations, the authors acknowledge that the evolution of discourses in SEAGA conferences is also a part of broader thematic shifts in international publications such as the Journal of Geography and has a direct bearing on changes in the geography curriculum in schools in other places around the world. In addition, there is a natural confluence of academic geographers and geography educators in the region in discoursing topics that matter to Southeast Asia.

Aims: In February and March 2014, more than 300,000 households were affected by water rationing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the surrounding State of Selangor. Further south, reservoir levels in Singapore were dropping, prompting the government to raise the water conservation rhetoric, but falling short of implementing water rationing schemes. The region experienced a dry spell that was unprecedented in the last 30 years. Preparedness for storms has been the "talk of the town" since the 2001, 2006 and 2007 extreme high precipitation events in the southern parts of the peninsula and in Singapore resulted in costly flood damage. While resilience has been a concept used frequently in climate change adaptation, it is derived from ecology, where it refers to the capacity of the system to respond to a disturbance and resist the impact or recover from the damage of the disturbance. This paper examines the case of Singapore as an urban area in responding to a similar extreme hydrologic phenomenon by examining the climate considerations in designing climate change adaptation strategies.
Place of Study: Singapore and peninsular Malaysia.
Methodology: The paper reviews the rainfall extremes statistics covering the last 30 years for Singapore and then takes a hydrologic event-based case study approach to more closely examine the impact of record storms and the drought of March 2014 to discuss aspects of resilience that can serve as lessons for tropical cities in future adaptation to a climate-changing world.
Results: Extreme rainfall events have become more frequent in Singapore over the past 30 years, while February, 2014 was the driest February since 1869. February, 2014 also had the lowest recorded daily relative humidity at 74.5%. Tropical cyclones are not expected to hit Singapore because of its location near the equator, yet Typhoon Vamei made history by delivering 210 mm of rain on 27 December, 2001. Between 19 and 20 December, 2007 Singapore received 366 mm of rain and within the same week another storm deposited 140 mm of rain in a 24 hour period. While there were some environmental and health impacts related to the February 2014 drought, including low dissolved oxygen levels in water and a localized fish kill, as well as reports of greater human respiratory problems, Singapore was able to weather the drought by requesting voluntary conservation measures, prudent reservoir management, and increasing the output of NEWater and desalinized water. Recent extreme rainfall events have produced localized flooding, but Singapore has progressively pursued a program of improved drainage, stream naturalization, and mplementation of Low Impact Development (LID) technology to reduce flood-prone areas from 3,200 ha in the 1970’s to 36 ha today.
Conclusion: We do not suggest that all countries need to have NEWater or desalinated water to solve drought problems. We do suggest that in managing rainfall related hazards, droughts and extremes have been treated rather independently. Based on the case study of extremes presented for Singapore we propose the importance of establishing a three-step preparedness program for extremes that includes Preparation (vulnerability and risk identification, adaptive capacity building, and monitoring), Response (information dissemination and relief action), and Recovery.

Set against the motivation for NIE/GPL to enhance Teacher Professional Development (TPD) in meeting the needs of our stakeholders, the question of what makes a teacher want to engage in TPD was raised. While a wide literature scan has shown numerous studies on TPD that illuminates different types of PD that teachers do consider effective, there exists little consensus on which type of PD works best. It is no surprise that there is inconclusive evidence on what makes a teacher want to do TPD. Today, the Singapore literature suffers from a dearth of empirical study to show what motivates a teacher to do TPD. Adopting a social psychology framework of Planned Behaviour Theory (TPB), this study sought to address the research problem above through a baseline study and an extended exploration on the factors affecting a teacher's motivation to do TPD. A variety of data collection methods were utilised in this study. In-depth interviews, questionnaire surveys and Focus Group Discussions (FGD) were used to construct baseline statistics while observations and fieldwork deepened the exploration and provided the triangulation to data collection, essentially improving the reliability of the study. The findings from this study present various important implications for NIE and her partners through detailed analysis which might reshape the trajectory and if need be, modify the nature of Singapore’s TPD service delivery.

This paper describes a baseline empirical study of Singapore secondary students' understanding of climate change . It reports that despite evidence of significant awareness on the topic , what learner's think they know does not match up with what they really know. Like other students around the world, their understanding of the phenomenon is not deep enough for accurate definition, explanation and linking of critical concepts together coherently and correctly. The paper critically examines how the introduction of a new national syllabus in geography in Singapore at grade 9level considers current developments in scientific discourse and affords the opportunity to help students develop values , knowledge, and skills to engage the climate change topic. The study argues for geographic education to be responsive in addressing gaps identified through updating the curriculum with current scientific discourse and by providing skills for students to engage a growing volume of information on climate change from various media.

The personalized project space is an important feature in G-Portal that supports individual and group learning activities. Within such a space, its owner can create, delete, and organize metadata referencing learning objects on the Web. Browsing and querying are among the functions provided to access the metadata. In addition, new schemas can be added to accommodate metadata of diverse attribute sets. Users can also easily share metadata across different projects using a “copy-and-paste” approach. Finally, a viewer to support offline viewing of personalized project content is also provided.

Unlike learning management systems that allow the instructor to organize resources in a predetermined structure which prescribes a fixed learning strategy, G-portal was developed to provide digital assets that will are used by students to solve an authentic problem based on real world resources. In contrast to learning management systems (LMS) that allow the teacher to organize resources in some predetermined structure which then prescribes a fixed learning strategy, digital libraries such as the G-portal provide users the opportunity to take control of their choice of resources, ways of representing and using these resources, creating new resources and even developing their own learning strategies. The G-portal developmental project was initiated as an attempt to improve on the existing capabilities of digital repositories and the move into multimodal representations, in that it hosts In order to effectively deploy the G-portal at local schools and test the effectiveness of the various capabilities of G-portal and the associated learning styles, a project was conducted to develop digital assets and to examine the usability and capabilities of the G-portal.