Lee, Yew-Jin

According to research studies, the topic of biological evolution proved to be extremely difficult to teach and to learn in schools. One possible reason for this situation was the lack of subject matter knowledge competence in this topic by biology teachers. Indeed, competence in subject matter knowledge (SMK) has been shown to be a central feature of the teaching profession. This study had hoped to determine the level of comprehension of biological evolution by Singapore high school biology teachers in which there is a dearth of information at the local level. Results of this study has important implications for teaching and learning evolution, teacher education and re-education.

A five option multiple-choice questionnaire with 24 questions on evolution and 12 on ecology was devised to ascertain the teachers' levels of comprehension in biological evolution. The results of the ability scores from a total of 52 teachers ranged from 3.53 to -0.56 logits (M=1.12 logits,SD=0.97); that of senior high or junior college (JC) teachers (n=12) ranged from 3.53 to 0.33 logits, and for junior high or secondary teachers (n=40) from3.01 to -0.56 logits (M=0.89 logits, SD=0.86). Mean total score in the achievement test for JC (M=79.4% or 1.86 logits, SD=1.0) and secondary school teachers (M=66.6% or 0.89 logits, SD=0.9) were significantly higher in favour of JC teachers (p<0.005). Similarly, JC teacher scores over the sub-section of evolution were significantly higher (p<0.001) than secondary teachers but not so with respect to ecology items. Lower ability teachers (mainly secondary school teachers) seemed also to experience greater difficulty with questions pertaining to evolution rather than on ecology.

Secondary school and JC teachers were found to be quite alike in terms of background variables like age, gender, teaching experience, number of years since graduation, religious affiliation, membership of professional organisations, academic qualifications, and past educational experience in evolution and ecology. JC teachers seemed to have a significantly greater number of years (p<0.05) of teaching pure biology compared to secondary teachers. Negative correlation existed between years of teaching pure biology in JC teachers and performance in the achievement test although there was moderate positive correlation between these variables among the secondary teachers. About 60% of JC teachers felt that they had mastered ecology and evolution in their present teaching job while the majority of secondary teachers indicated mastery at the time when they studied at the university. Analysis of achievement test scores from a sample of 24 pre-service student teachers supported the possibility that teaching and learning on-the-job as biology specialists in the academically demanding college environment contributed to higher scores in the achievement test for JC teachers. This had translated into significantly greater (p<0.005) actual coverage and emphasis given to evolution by JC teachers than by secondary school teachers. Similarly, the intended coverage and emphasis by JC teachers were significantly more (p<0.05) than that of secondary teachers.

Analysis of the achievement test results revealed specific instances of misconceptions or alternative conceptions. These inappropriate concepts were more often spotted amongst the answers by the secondary teachers than the JC ones. The alternative conceptions included three main key concepts, namely;

The Theory of Evolution in General, Speciation, and Natural Selection which are discussed in detail in this study.

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.

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.

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.