Tan, Timothy Ter Ming

Globalization, changing demographics, and technological advancements are some of the key driving forces of the future. Our students will have to be prepared to face these challenges and seize the opportunities brought about by these forces. Teaching and learning science can no longer be focused on acquisition of knowledge. Instead, a future-ready individual should develop discipline-specific and interdisciplinary ways of problem-solving. Instilling a range of cognitive and meta-cognitive skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and self-regulation, as well as the right attitude and values such as motivation, trust, respect for life, and diversity, become key elements of science learning. To achieve these learning goals, the Singapore Science Curriculum has made scientific inquiry as its pedagogical underpinning. Structures have been put in place to encourage teachers to try out different inquiry-based activities that develop these twenty-first century competencies. This chapter presents three innovative science and STEM learning approaches – image-to-writing approach (a model-based inquiry), spiral model of collaborative knowledge improvement (an argumentation approach), and microbial fuel cell (a design-based pedagogy) – adopted by science teachers to prepare their charges for the future and discusses how these pedagogical approaches contribute to the development of these competencies.