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An exploratory study on Singapore early childhood educators' creative teaching
Author
Lim, Siew Eng
Supervisor
Tan, Ai-Girl
Abstract
In this dissertation an exploratory study was conducted which aimed to find out Singapore’s early childhood educators’ views and practices on creative teaching. Two research questions were posed: What are early childhood educators’ views on creative teaching? How do early childhood educators practise creative teaching? The study adopted a concurrent mixed method research design using a questionnaire (quantitative) and semi-structured interview (qualitative) to collect data. Apart from demographic backgrounds, the questionnaire included two measures. The first measure comprised 49 items related to teachers’ perceived competencies in creative teaching. The second measure consisted of 54 items aimed to find out teachers’ perception of roles and characteristics important for creative teaching. For the two measures, a 9-Likert scale was used with indicators: 1 being “extremely not competent” or “extremely not important”, 9 being “extremely competent” or “extremely important”. Thirty-five educators in the early childhood settings completed and returned a questionnaire and ten of them attended face-to-face or zoom interviews. Using SPSS, reliability, factor, correlational, and cluster analyses were performed on data collected from the questionnaire. The findings suggested that early childhood educators in the study perceived relatively highly their competencies in creative teaching and they highly rated their multiple teacher roles for creative teaching. Data of the interviews were analysed thematically. Emergent themes were teacher roles in creative teaching, physical outdoor, indoor, and learning centre environment, social emotion, space and time, creative activities, peer interaction, fostering creativity strategies and COVID 19 constraints. Findings of the study, strengths and limitations of the study, as well as implications of the study were presented.
Date Issued
2021
Call Number
LB1062 Lim
Date Submitted
2021