Lee, Yew-Jin

While student achievement has recently been shown to be very successful in international tests in Singapore, both qualitative and quantitative research has shown that classroom teaching here is still largely frontal, directed teaching albeit of a high quality and that students’ epistemic practices are scarce. Longitudinal studies of a “model” secondary school that adopted inquiry science practices also showed that recent reforms did not significantly improve students’ generation of new knowledge just as teaching was mainly confined to traditional methods [3]. Statistical modeling [2] has reported that the logic of teaching in East Asian contexts dictates high-efficiency content coverage in the face of high-stakes assessment regimes and societal expectations of success. The PISA 2012 report has even speculated that high content mastery by students has been a significant reason for their strong achievement in mathematics here that has compensated for fewer problem-solving skills.I claim that this situation is unsatisfactory; teachers in Singapore enjoy high levels of training in curriculum, leadership, and assessment strategies but development in the liberal education tradition appears to be lacking or unable to show itself in the classroom. This is a problem that demands a shift in thinking about what constitutes genuine learning and asks if politicians are serious about the rhetoric of effective learning in the 21st century. As a science teacher-educator, I have been experimenting with practice-based teaching, which I will share during my presentation. These have included a program where preservice teachers mentor after-school inquiry investigations with groups of pupils over a school term. Here, teachers and pupils collaboratively engage in projects whereby there are often no known answers in the textbooks although the teachers explicitly act as facilitators. Such practice-based teaching that follows the US Fifth Dimension program [1] help close the theory-practice gaps and are a viable model also for PD. As well, I share similar work done using a Microbial Fuel Cell with secondary school students and their teachers. We have much theoretical support from the ideas put forth by many from Aristotle to Durkheim, Michael Young and Paul Ricoeur about the need for intertwining abstract and practical knowledge. It is my contention that teachers in Singapore are ultimately underperforming with regard to their potential similar to a powerful car that is imprisoned in a garage and that once education (rather than mere training) is given priority, education for the young can truly advance.

Does nonverbal cues increase the propensity of teachers’ instructive discourse and at the same time assesses students’ cognitive construction of knowledge? The researches that attest to the effectiveness of gestures are by far those conducted on younger children. Few of such research have been done on college students and in Science subjects. As such a randomized pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design of 14 matched pairs were tasked to watch one of the two videotaped lessons on a topic in Biology. In the video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson, the teacher produced gestures to illustrate concepts while in the video-cum-slides-only lesson the teacher did not produce any gestures. In a post-test of 10 Multiple-Choice-Questions attempted by these 28 students, students who watched video-cum-slides-only lesson scored a mean of 7.6 while students who watched video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson scored a mean of 6.2. 7 of these matched pairs further underwent a feedback session with the teacher while the other 7 did not. A follow up test showed that students who had feedback given scored higher and progressed from a discordant stage of gesture-speech mismatch to the concordant stage of gesture-speech match of a right concept while those without feedback regressed.

The paper presents a case study report of two high school students’ explanation of addition reaction during an interview. It aims to characterise students’ discourse dealing with the concepts of reaction mechanism from a multimodal communication perspective. The research addresses the following questions: (1) What roles do the different communicative modes play within students’ discourse? (2) What are the relationships among communicative modes used by the students? A theoretical framework based on multimodal communication and social semiotics which guided the analysis of the students’ discourse and the results of the analysis are presented in the paper. Implications for teaching and learning of science are also drawn from the study.

This paper draws on Foucault to (a) describe the production of classroom discourse in relation to how ordering manifests within the discourse, and (b) to explicate how chemistry classroom discourses are not fixed but are the site of constant contestations of power as displayed in an eighty minute high school lesson on organic chemistry in Singapore. This microanalysis of discourse provides opportunities to reconstruct how teachers teach and dispels the notion that power is uniquely their sovereign possession. Classroom instruction is in fact a complex activity that coordinates power/knowledge production through communication. Examining classroom instruction through Foucaultian lenses uncovers the taken for granted nature of communication and illustrates the capillary relations of power and knowing.

A questionnaire survey was administered to 66 secondary 5 Normal level students in Singapore to sample students' ideas on the scientific concept of food in school biology. Between 30% to 60% of the respondents believed that food yielded energy but this concept was context dependent and not widespread. Primary responses predominated as students felt that the biological functions of food were for sustenance, satiation, growth and general well-being. They seemed to hold a simplistic view that anything that was consumable (edible) was considered to be a food. More than 75% of the sample accepted the idea that food can be in liquid state. Students' understanding of the biological concept of food was anthropocentric and not applied across living organisms in heterotrophs (animals) or autotrophs (plants) as a whole. The components of a balanced diet were understood but many students confused the concepts of nutrients and water, believing the latter to be a food.

This paper provides a situative account of a teacher becoming a technology-using educator. The specific process of becoming was described on a micro-genetic level to show how the process of becoming is relationally constituted with an experienced other. The significance of this study is that it provides an empirical account on the increasingly important issue of identity and learning.

Research on argumentation has increased our understanding of knowledge construction, group learning, and scaffolding structures in CSCL although analyses of argumentation pose many difficulties. This could be due to the many theoretical positions that can be taken when approaching discourse data. In this paper, we use three popular analytic methods (interactional, content-specific, and linguistic) to compare the same fragment of scientific argumentation by Grade 4 children in Singapore. We show the complementary emphases and strengths of each disciplinary position as well as their weaknesses. The results imply that analytic methods arising from different disciplinary positions can potentially broaden our overall understanding of using argumentation in CSCL.

This paper describes how five elementary school students learnt about environmental science and the nature of science as they were engaged in Knowledge Building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003) during a Nature Learning Camp project. Unlike the emphasis on "doing" in inquiry-based project work, which precludes making cutting edge discoveries by students, Knowledge Building channels students‘ attention on the continual advancement of group ideas and thus opens the way for appropriating the scientific process of knowledge creation. This is because it takes advantage of a young child‘s inquisitiveness to develop him/her to become a mature knowledge producer as he/she pushes up his/her level of understanding. In this study, we tracked the knowledge development of this group of students and its process as they studied about plants. Using qualitative discourse analysis, we found advancement in students‘ ideas about science process skills and the nature of science. However, much support from the teacher was needed for knowledge advancement to take place; the teacher played an important role in engaging the students in sustained talk around the topic and in directing the focus for on their own, students‘ talk was rather shallow and ideas were fleeting. We conclude that to engage students in Knowledge Building effectively, science argumentation skills are important discourse skills to develop.