Azilawati Jamaludin

Identifying educational competencies for the 21st workplace is driven by the need to mitigate disparities between classroom learning and the requirements of workplace environments. Multiple descriptors of desired 21st century skill sets have been identified through various wide-scale studies (e.g., International Commission on Education for the 21st Century) and consistently within the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, the ability to problem solve, particularly complex problem-solving, remains a crucial competency. In this paper, we look at how current contemporary spaces such as the immensely popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG), World of Warcraft, (WoW) afford problem-solving skill acquisition in the context of Singaporean youth learners. Given that WoW exists as a contextual space with an overarching narrativized problem to be solved, our investigation focused on two important related constructs that underpin learners’ problem-solving trajectory—learning and identity becoming within contemporary domains of technology learning. We present findings of an ethnographic investigation of one youth gamer within the affinity spaces of WoW. Moving away from traditional mentalistic construals of problem-solving, our findings indicate that problem-solving within WoW may be characterized by a triadic-D model of domain, disquisitional, and discursive practices within self, social, and structural dialectics. Theoretical considerations for broadening the understanding of a situated and embodied notion of problem-solving and identity becoming within STEM learning are proposed.

Interest is an essential motivational component that plays a significant role in learning. It is therefore important to have a better understanding of how interest is triggered for it to develop into a more developed and productive form of interest. Most studies of interest have historically relied on self-report measures, with participants being unable to provide a full and accurate reporting on the triggering process of interest. This is because triggers of interest are characteristically unexpected and fleeting. It has therefore been suggested to use observational studies to collect richer and more detailed data on the triggering process of interest. This paper investigates how interest is triggered using observational methods from a case study analysis of data collected from a 10-week coding programme coupled with the use of psychophysiological measures as a novel measure of triggered interest. Findings together with implications and future research are discussed.

In this article, the authors discuss the importance of studying identity in the context of 21st century learning. Identity is an evolving trajectory that is always in-flux or changing. In a fast changing 21st century, educators are recognizing the significance of identity work, in particular projective ident1ty, as individuals participate in multiple roles. The purpose of this article is to formulate key tenets for the study of projective identity in the form of role-play(s) as youth-participants navigate different social and spatial affinity spaces, and to describe why it is important to 21st century learning.

This paper reports the impact of using a structured argumentation board and enactive role play in Second Life on students' argumentative writing skills in the context of the A-level subject General Paper. Students were taught the structural aspects of argumentation based on Toulmin's (1958) argumentation framework. The structured argumentation board, Voices of Reason, supported their argumentation discourse while the Second Life platform supported students' contextualised role-playing activities on the topic of globalisation. Students participated in these two separate modes of technology-facilitated learning in a cyclic, interwoven fashion, alternating back and forth between two cycles of argument and enaction. Data in the form of argumentative essays were collected at the beginning and the end of a four week intervention period. We compare the pre and post intervention argumentation essays written by the students based on Toulmin’s argumentation framework, contrast the findings with that of the control group's argumentative essays, and present the statistical results in this paper.

Approximately 15%–20% of school-aged children suffer from mathematics learning difficulties (MLD). Most children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) or MLD also have comorbid cognitive deficits. Recent literature suggests that research should focus on uncovering the neural underpinnings of MLD across more inclusive samples, rather than limiting studies to pure cases of DD or MLD with highly stringent inclusion criteria. Therefore, this study aims to identify neural aberrancies that may be common across multiple MLD cases with different deficit profiles. Nine MLD cases and 45 typically developing (TD) children, all around 7 years old (27 boys), were recruited. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), brain data were collected during an approximate resting state and a mathematical computation task (addition). Graph theory was then applied to assess global and nodal network indicators of brain function. When comparing the network indicators and brain activation of the MLD cases to those of TD children, no unified neural aberrancy was found across all cases. However, three MLD cases did show distinct neural aberrancies compared to TD children. The study discusses the implications of these findings, considering both the neural aberrancies in the three MLD cases and the neural similarities found in the other six cases, which were comparable to those of the TD children. This raises important questions about the presence and nature of aberrant neural indicators in MLD across large cohorts and highlights the need for further research in this area.

In this paper, we discuss metacognition against a backdrop of 21st century traversals, where learners are constantly moving and interacting across different contexts. We describe how learners’ traversals are underpinned by triadic coupling relationships between self, social others, and cultural resources. Drawing our observations from contemporary contextual spaces of online games, we articulate how a situated and embodied form of metacognition pivots the dialectics of the aforementioned coupling relationships.

In this chapter, we examine how we can sustain educational innovations from the ecological perspective, where multiple stakeholders at the leadership level can help new adopters of innovations to construct an ecosystem that is conducive to deep learning. From our studies, we established that schools could sustain educational innovations to achieve purposeful learning by leveraging ecosystem carryover effects, which are defined by Ron Adner (2012) as the process of leveraging successful elements in constructing one ecosystem to create advantages in constructing a new ecosystem. We found four types of carryover effects that can occur in self-renewing learning networks that engender new knowledge, namely: structural, economic, socio-cultural and epistemic ecosystem carryover effects. For the rest of this chapter, we will explain how we had identified these carryover effects and provide preliminary evidence for the impact of these carryover effects in sustaining educational innovations that move towards achieving life-long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise learning in the schools.

Grounded in our work on analysing teacher learning communities as they evolve from traditional learning epistemologies towards constructivist orientations and progressive, inquiry-driven pedagogies (Hung et al., J Interactive Learn Res 17:37–55, 2006; Hung et al., Educ Technol 55:20–26, 2015; Shaari et al., in press; Wu and Hung, Transforming learning, empowering learners: The international conference of the learning sciences (ICLS). International Society of the Learning Sciences, Singapore, vol 1, pp 474–481, 2016), this paper articulates teacher learning communities as catalytic levers for educational innovation in Singapore schools. We begin with an articulation of the characterizations of teacher learning communities within the Singapore education system—from those that organically emerge at the grassroots (teacher) level to those that were intentionally designed at the systems (ministry) level. While there has been growing recognition for networked learning of school faculties that engender results, which are meaningful and impactful at both the teacher and student level, the purported stance is that change towards innovation and progressive, inquiry-driven learning practices is not just a change in instructional strategies but also a fundamental change in teachers’ epistemologies. Through case examples of the developmental processes of a networked learning community within the system, we posit that apprenticeship-learning affordances of networked learning communities underpin teachers’ shifts in epistemology and function as proximal vehicles for catalyzing innovations through progressive, inquiry-driven pedagogies. These shifts are engendered through tenets of (i) growth intentionality, (ii) dialectics of structure-agency, design-emergence, periphery-centrality, and commonality-diversity, (iii) socio-technological leverages, and (iv) ecological coherence and alignments. Expanding our analysis both vertically (macro systems level to micro personal level) and horizontally (abstract cross-disciplines to concrete subject-specific affinities), we ground these theoretical ideas to a nuanced understanding of scalable epistemic learning, in the context of educational innovation and diffusion.