Today's science education faces the imperative task of developing students’ competency to navigate misinformation while broadening the scope of scientific literacy. Traditionally, the concept of epistemic dependence, which encourages public trust in professional scientists, has supported this goal. However, the current landscape of science challenges the notions of experts with unanimous opinions and ‘the public’ as passive recipients of scientific information. In response, this case study examines the LK-99 incident, which involved a claimed discovery in the historic room-temperature and ambient-pressure superconductor, employing the Hype Cycle as the analytical framework. Data were collected on internet search traffic, discourse within the scientific community, mass media articles, and social media posts from July to December 2023, utilizing various online data analytics platforms. The researchers (1) quantitatively identified patterns in search trends, document sentiments, and associated word tokens related to LK-99, (2) qualitatively analyzed the shifting standpoints of stakeholders, the scientific community, mass media, and social media, and (3) synthesized these findings within the Hype Cycle framework. The results illustrate how the misinformation about LK-99 rapidly spread online (phase 1), leading to disagreements among scientists and confusion among the public, alongside erratic behavior in the stock market (phase 2). Ironically, the stakeholders' positioning themselves as scientists facilitated the scientific community's falsification of the claim (phase 3). We discuss the methodological and theoretical implications of this case and propose a reconceptualization of epistemic dependence centered on the scientific community as a whole and its collectively committed process of resolving uncertainty and verifying knowledge claims.

To align with the goal of this section, we propose an ontological turn to the psychology research paradigm that extends beyond mainstream methodology. Drawing on the existing literature of indigenous psychology (IP) and two qualitative studies from Singapore and Malaysia, we critically examine the differences of epistemology and methodology between mainstream approaches in Western psychology and the IP approach to the culturally different other. Next, we extract the research methods adopted by scientific inquiries of dang-ki healing within certain Chinese communities and experiences of suffering within the Temiar tribal group. These methods include establishing the reciprocal relationship and fluid boundary between the investigators (observers) and investigated (observed), conducting qualitative research in a natural setting with cognitive flexibility, using fieldtrip immersion to gain insiders' worldviews and feedback on the findings. Finally, we offer a few action guidelines for future researchers conducting indigenous psychological research in the communities.

Test anxiety is experienced in competence-based situations, such as tests and exams, where one is anxious and concerned about failure in performance outcomes. It is often of interest to both research and applied settings to identify students who are high on test anxiety to understand the characteristics of high test anxiety or to provide support and intervention for these students. This systematic review focuses on the methods in which Grades 1–12 (or equivalent) students were identified based on varying test anxiety levels. A total of 99 studies from 92 papers met the inclusion criteria. The extracted data from the studies included strategies employed to identify “levels” of test anxiety, details on the test anxiety measures used, and methodological strategies that were most commonly used to examine students with defined levels of test anxiety. The results of this analysis demonstrated significant variability in the methods and materials used to establish levels among students and demonstrated several significant areas where improvements in the field are warranted before confidence in most leveling strategies can be asserted.

Despite the consistently remarkable success of Singapore students in international assessments, little is known about the critical factors that drive their reading achievement. Much of the existing research has narrowly focused on a few relevant factors. However, since reading achievement is a complex phenomenon simultaneously determined by numerous different factors, a more integrative lens is needed. This paper aims to demonstrate the application of machine learning to determine the most critical factors that could predict Singapore students’ reading performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Based on the PISA framework, the variables were categorized into ‘student background’, ‘schooling’ and ‘non-cognitive/metacognitive’ constructs. The results indicated that the variables associated with the ‘non-cognitive/metacognitive’ constructs (e.g., metacognition and joy of reading) were deemed as the key predictors of achievement. Our study can provide valuable insights for policymakers and educators, aiding them in prioritizing factors to address in their endeavours to improve learning outcomes.

Positive youth development (PYD) has gained considerable traction among developmental scientists, but past studies were generally conducted among youth samples from Minority World countries. This study investigated the factorial validity of the newly developed 7Cs model of PYD (competence, confidence, connection, character, caring, contribution, and creativity). Specifically, we compared four measurement models (one-factor, seven-factor, higher order, and bifactor) among emerging adults living in five Southeast Asian countries. The study also aimed to establish evidence of measurement invariance across gender, age, education, and country of origin. Criterion-related validity was also sought using COVID-19 socially responsive behaviors and anxiety. Controlling for the influence of gender, age, and education, sample-level comparisons were also performed on the 7Cs. Data came from 1,888 emerging adults (Mage = 24.10; SDage = 6.89) from Indonesia (n = 253), Malaysia (n = 289), the Philippines (n = 496), Singapore (n = 306), and Thailand (n = 544) during the pandemic. The results supported the superiority of the seven-factor model, which exhibited strict invariance across gender, age, and education and partial scalar invariance across country of origin. The 7Cs exhibited mixed associations with the pandemic-related measures. Significant differences were found in the 7Cs across the five countries. The study provides additional evidence on the theoretical validity of the 7Cs model among youth from understudied settings, while also highlighting avenues for refining current PYD measures.

India is at the forefront of Asia’s urban transformation, with its urban population projected to reach 814 million by 2050. The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), launched in 2015, aimed to modernise 100 cities by integrating smart technologies to enhance governance, infrastructure, and quality of life. Initially influenced by Western smart urban models, SCM implementation followed a top-down approach, yet over time, cities have adapted smart initiatives to local needs. At the same time, centralised projects such as Integrated Command and Control Centers (ICCCs) shaped early implementations, decentralised, community-driven adaptations have gained prominence. Cities like Bhubaneswar, Indore, and Varanasi have prioritised inclusive urban services, including transportation, sanitation, and cultural heritage conservation. Despite significant achievements, future smart urbanism must prioritise smaller cities, marginalised communities, and ecological sustainability. Emphasising participatory governance, gender-sensitive planning, and nature-based solutions can foster a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient urban future for India.

Physical punishment is associated with numerous negative child outcomes, including poor adjustment, antisocial behavior and poor parent-child relationships. Despite the extensively documented negative consequences, many parents continue to use it. This qualitative study examines parents’ motivations for using physical punishment, which provides crucial insights to facilitate interventions that reduce its use. The study addresses a knowledge gap by exploring the contextual nuances of parents’ use of physical punishment. Twenty parents (six fathers) with children aged 2 to 12 who were residing in Singapore participated in the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand parents’ attitudes toward physical punishment, the reasons and contexts of its use, and parents’ inner experiences when using physical punishment. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was conducted. The results show that despite parents’ self-professed use of physical punishment, they expressed discomfort toward it and readily acknowledged its drawbacks. Meting out physical punishment was an intensely negative experience for parents and children, often resulting in parents experiencing guilt and pain. While physical punishment was often used as a last resort, or when parents wished to emphasize the severity of the child’s transgression, parents’ mood and stress also factored heavily into its use. There is a need for efforts to move beyond education and advocacy on the negative impact of physical punishment, which parents are aware of. Interventions should focus on helping parents regulate their emotions effectively in discipline situations, and to provide behavioral support for parents who may struggle to change existing discipline patterns.

We study the implementation of holonomic quantum gates preserved from arbitrary single-qubit and two-qubit decoherence or errors using a dynamical decoupling approach. To integrate the holonomic feature with the dynamical decoupling technique, we require only one auxiliary qubit for single-qubit gates and no auxiliary qubit for two-qubit gates. Our scheme uses far fewer physical qubits to achieve this integration compared to existing proposals in the literature. Moreover, the scheme is based on system interactions that can be experimentally realized with superconducting qubits. These advantages suggest that our scheme is a promising step toward developing noise-resistant quantum devices.

Blended synchronous learning (BSL) is commonly used to deliver lectures. There are challenges in engaging online students when they are doing hands-on activities. In this study, two groups of students took a course lasting 13 weeks. This course heavily involved hands-on activities. 3-4 students attended the course from home using video conferencing in each session. Some strategies were applied to engage them during the sessions. The purpose of the study was to explore how to effectively engage online students in hands-on activities and their perceptions of the strategies used. Results showed that having a teaching assistant, peer feedback, back-channel communication, clear audio, and two device setups helped engage online students in hands-on activities. Implications for teachers and researchers are suggested.

Empirical evidence on students' perceived difficulty of interdisciplinary learning and associated experience is limited. This study aimed to address the gap in an interdisciplinary digital literacy course. The class activities were designed based on the characteristics of interdisciplinary learning tasks, such as the problem originating from the real world, and surveys were collected over eight weeks. Our findings indicate that surprise, curiosity, confusion, anxiety, joy, and frustration are positively associated with motivating goal-oriented affect, suggesting that students were actively engaged and motivated when they experienced various positive and negative emotions. Motivating goal-directed affect positively predicts students' collaborative interdisciplinary problem-solving, while confusion and boredom play negative roles, highlighting the need to enhance students' motivation and address negative emotions to facilitate interdisciplinary learning.

While the potential benefits of AI in education have been widely acknowledged, there is a lack of research investigating how to leverage AI to promote language learning, especially among young learners. In this study, an AIpowered seamless vocabulary learning system – ARCHe – was designed and developed. The purpose of this paper is to report on the learning effectiveness of using ARCHe and explore the pedagogical affordances of AI to power seamless learning for young learners. The system has been implemented and evaluated in three government primary schools in Singapore, involving a total of 140 students and 6 teachers. The findings of the study indicate that the use of ARCHe significantly improves students’ performance in Chinese character and vocabulary learning, regardless of their school contexts and prior language proficiency. Moreover, the results suggest that AI-enabled multimodal feedback may contribute to enhancing students’ engagement in classroom-based collaborative learning activities. Given the absence of correlation among students' emotional engagement, Chinese language proficiency, and the quality and quantity of students' home-based work, future studies on AI-enhanced seamless learning, particularly those focusing on young learners, should delve into background variables that could impact students’ learning engagement.

Student-Generated Ideas (SGI) is a socio-constructivist pedagogical approach that positions the development of student-generated ideas at the core of the learning trajectory alongside desired learning outcomes. This paper investigates the use of whole-class discussion as a pedagogical strategy to foster the evolution of SGIs in a blended primary science lesson in the Singapore context. Through a case study, we examine the design and implementation of a technology-enhanced SGI lesson, focusing on how students' ideas were generated and evolved, and the discursive practices employed by both the teacher and the students. Through qualitative data analysis, our findings uncover the richness of the SGIs, the teacher’s adept orchestration of the discussion, the diverse cognitive processes exhibited by the students and the scaffolds employed by the teacher. The discussion extracts key design and enactment implications, which encompass, but are not limited to, the integral role of technology in supporting idea evolution beyond the lesson and the important role of the teacher in the effective use of whole-class discussion in SGI lessons.

This paper presents a blended learning environment designed based on conceptual change and constructivist principles. The constructivist perspective emphasizes the critical role of conceptual change in the active construction of knowledge by students. Conceptual change is a significant alteration of cognitive structure due to inconsistency with previous experience, usually caused by cognitive conflict. During the learning process, new concepts can challenge and modify established ones, contributing to the transformation and reconstruction of students' understanding. However, current science curriculum design has several issues. These include ignoring students' existing conceptual and cognitive levels, a lack of individualized instruction, and a lack of focus and coherence in curriculum design. To tackle these issues, the study proposes a blended learning environment based on constructivism, which aims to provoke cognitive conflict among students throughout the learning process. Reorganizing instructional tasks and offering technical assistance to teachers and students integrates online and offline learning to facilitate students' constructing a more profound comprehension of scientific knowledge. This design aims to offer a personalized approach to teaching and learning, promoting students' deeper understanding and reconstruction of scientific concepts. It provides valuable insights and guidance for enhancing the design of science curricula.

In 2020, Singapore’s government introduced the “Knowing Asia” education policy. Since 2022, about 900 experienced teachers from Singapore have embarked on regional study trips to 20 Asian cities as part of a university-based teacher education and leadership development programme. These teachers have middle leadership responsibilities across diverse schools in Singapore, ranging from primary, secondary, pre-university, special education, and madrasah (schools that provide Islamic religious education along with mainstream curriculum). To encourage networking and co-leadership, participants must self-organise their five-day regional study trip in teams of 12-15 members. This paper introduces key strengths and limitations of embedding regional study trips in teacher education curriculum. From Singapore’s perspective, strengths and limitations include: (i) naturalistic opportunities for teachers to stretch their networking capabilities, (ii) experiential professional learning in an Asian city, however, (iii) it can be a challenge to secure learning visits to local schools and industries given the short planning timeline. From the perspective of regional cities, strengths and limitations include: (i) opportunities to have in-person touchpoints with teachers from diverse schools in Singapore, (ii) strengthening of regional friendship and cooperation at the people-to-people level, but (iii) with the limitation of being unable to accommodate self-organised requests for informal visits to public schools due to established protocols for handling such requests at a more formal government-to-government level. The paper concludes with recommendations for sustaining in-person people-to-people networks between teachers in Asia through regional study visits, while balancing with opportunities for online networking in the digital age.

Spin ensembles play a pivotal role in various quantum applications such as metrology and simulations of many-body physics. Recent research has proposed utilizing spin cat states to encode logical quantum information, with logical lifetimes potentially on the order of seconds, achieved via enhanced collective interactions that scale with system size. We investigate the dynamics of spin cat states under inhomogeneous broadening, revealing a phenomenon termed “parity-sensitive inhomogeneous dephasing”: For small amplitudes, odd cat states are significantly more susceptible to inhomogeneous dephasing than even cat states due to the difference in parity symmetry. This discrepancy between even and odd cat states vanishes at large amplitudes and behaves similarly to a spin coherent state with the same amplitude. To analyze the stability of the spin coherent state, we perform a mean-field analysis of the driven-dissipative dynamics, from which we identify a synchronization phase transition wherein the ensemble becomes completely dephased beyond a critical inhomogeneous linewidth. The mean-field analysis suggests that the dissipative stabilization can suppress the decoherence effects from inhomogeneous broadening. We argue that the stability of the mean-field model provides a reasonable estimate for that of spin cat states with a large amplitude in the full quantum model. Our findings shed light on the stability of collective spin states, which is important for advancing quantum technologies.

A growing body of research within World Englishes has mapped multilinguals’ language use in digital and social media. While some studies have carried questions and methodologies of offline sociolinguistics into the digital realm, there is increasing recognition that online communication must be studied as digital social practice where different Englishes act as resources in the expression of identities and the negotiation of social meanings and relationships. This study contributes to this body of scholarship by examining the use of Singlish in a corpus of 50 TikToks produced by 21 Singaporean content creators. A quantitative investigation of features established the most frequently used pragmatic, lexical and morpho-syntactic features, while the qualitative discourse analysis examined how these features were drawn upon in the expression of stances and identities. Results support theorizations of Singlish as shifting assemblages of features in multiple scales of the indexical order.

Using large-scale data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012, 2015, 2018, and 2022, this study explored the relations between outside school ICT use for different purposes and academic performance in reading, mathematics, and science in Hong Kong and Singapore. Three key findings were identified: (1) ICT use for entertainment and academic performance consistently showed inverted U-shaped relations across PISA waves, with the turning point gradually shifting rightward over time; (2) ICT use for learning and academic performance evolved from predominantly linear or near-linear relations in 2012 to inverted U-shaped curves in subsequent waves; (3) Singapore exhibited progressively flatter inverted U-curves in the relations between ICT use for learning and academic performance, while Hong Kong demonstrated slightly steeper curves over time.

In this article, we draw upon notions of datafication and data citizenship to explore assessment practices in Singapore schools. Interviews with teachers, principals and students illustrated how they were actively involved in a much more ‘educative’ form of engagement with data, characterized by efforts to ameliorate consequential negative effects of testing, even as meritocratic tendencies challenged such efforts. The research highlights the benefits of teacher, principal and student active engagement with data, reflecting aspects of data citizenship; this ensures that more limited and limiting concerns about increased focus upon data, especially in quantitative forms, are not left unchecked.