Enhancing the pedagogy of mathematics teachers to facilitate the development of 21st century competencies in their classrooms (EPMT-21st CC)

The results of both PISA (2009, 2012) and TIMSS (2011, 2007) for Singapore show us that majority of our students are very good in applying their knowledge in routine situations and this is definitely a consequence of what teachers do and use during their mathematics lessons. For our students to scale greater heights we need our teachers to nurture metacognitive learners who are active and confident in constructing mathematical knowledge.

A significant finding from the CORE 2 research at NIE led by Professor David Hogan is that amongst the secondary three and primary five mathematics lessons that were studied teachers appeared to engage students in doing performative tasks (77.3% for secondary 3 and 63.7% for primary 5) more often than knowledge building tasks (22.7% for secondary 3 and 36.3 % for primary 5) (Hogan et al, 2013). A performative task mainly entails the use of lower order thinking skills such as recall, comprehension and application of knowledge while a knowledge building task calls for higher order thinking skills such as synthesis, evaluation and creation of knowledge.

Hattie (2009), drawing on 50,000 research articles and related achievement of 240 million students, notes that the greatest source of variance in the learning equation comes from teachers. Therefore as we are desirous of improving student learning, in our mathematics classrooms, it is critical that we engage our teachers in specific and targeted professional development.