Teo, Tang Wee

Play has an important role throughout childhood as children learn and develop through engaging in play. The aim of this study was to examine how purposeful play can be used to introduce and facilitate the learning of science ideas and scientific skills in young children in the Singapore context. Science activities were carried out with preschool children aged 5 to 6 through the use of purposeful play, and the video and audio recordings of the science activities were analysed using qualitative coding methods to identify the science learning that took place while engaging in purposeful play. The coded data were written into narratives to illustrate the process and learning outcomes of the science activities conducted using purposeful play. The findings of this study indicate that young children are able to display science process skills and learn science ideas through engaging in purposeful play.

Children are by nature curious and they are motivated to explore the world around them. Their science process skills develop as early as infancy and throughout their informal schooling years. A lack of external stimuli in the environment which allow them to actively engage in science learning may result in them not developing fully in the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective aspects. As such, science education at early childhood is of great importance to many aspects of a child's development and researchers have suggested that children should begin learning science in their early years of schooling. In Singapore, science is not formally introduced to the Singapore school curriculum until primary three. However, some teachers do teach science to primary one and two students. In the MOE Kindergarten Curriculum Framework, the espoused views about the roles science teachers should undertake and the learning outcomes of science learning can be found in the learning area ''Discovery of the World''. This is a proposal for an exploratory two-year research study ''Children are Natural Scientists'': Learning Science in Early Childhood and Early Primary Years that aims to examine how Singapore young children (ages 4-8) engage in science learning. The research question and sub-questions we want to address are: How do young children engage in science learning? 1. How science process skills do they use as participated in the science activities? 2. What forms of science talk do they use as they participated in the science activities? This is a first Singapore study that introduces science to preschool and early primary children. The short-term goal of the study is to develop knowledge about ways preschool and early primary Singapore children engage in science learning. Our long-term goal is build on the work done in this exploratory study to conduct a larger scale study with more science activities. The repertoire of science activities can become resources for Singapore preschool and primary teachers. The research findings will become resources for us to conduct teacher professional development courses for teachers so that they may learn how to use the science activities in their own classrooms. The intellectual merit of this study is that it contributes to the existing early childhood science education literature which is mostly based in western contexts and does not contain any studies about Singapore students at these grade levels. The broader impact of this study is that can provide empirical evidence showing the importance of science education at early childhood/primary levels to local science educators and policy makers.

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.

United States’ education reform document like the new A Framework for K-12 Science Education discussed a more scientific way of learning – the emphasis of scientific inquiry through Science Practices, which include both specific scientific skills and cognitive processes. Likewise, in Singapore, the importance of Science Practices is reflected as desirable learning outcomes in the secondary (Grade 7 – 11) science syllabuses. With the significance of Science Practices in education, this study serves to identify the challenging types of Science Practices for students, specifically those from the lower secondary (Grade 7 – 8) Normal streams in Singapore. In this research, these students were collectively known as the Low Progress group due to their weaker academic abilities. Three science inference tests with 35 individual items assessing various Science Practices were administered and responses were analysed with Rasch analysis. Thereafter, Science Practices were categorised into higher-order, middle-order and lower-order to reflect the students’ difficulty in applying them. Results showed that students struggled the most with Science Practices that required them to decipher information that were beyond their language abilities. These findings will be useful towards teaching, assessing, curriculum planning and research studies involving the academically weaker students.