Looi, Chee-Kit

A learning-by-teaching environment can be used to create a context in which the student can play the role of tutor teaching the agent tutee. Without meaningful feedback from the agent, there is no reason to expect much student’s engagement with the teaching interaction and growth in learning. This study tries to investigate the design of agent tutee’s question prompts that can engage the student’s role-playing as tutor and thereby stimulate reflective knowledge-building in a learning-by-teaching agent environment, Betty’s Brain. A pilot study that compares question prompts with self-reflection prompts within the agent environment is undertaken. Question prompts are more specific and concrete questions related to the tutor’s teaching and in which the student tutor needs to respond. Self-reflection prompts are more general prompts to stimulate self-reflection. The result gives us some preliminary evidence that the question prompts support on role-playing can be positive in enhancing student’s learning when pursing learning-by-teaching activities.

This study examines 10 weeks of collaborative learning activities that are supported by the GroupScribbles (GS) software technology in 2 Singapore Primary 4 Science classrooms. It is found that GS supports instant formative feedback from students and from teachers effectively. GS plays a positive role at both the level of individual learners and that of group learners. Several emergent collaboration behaviors manifested by students in GS were observed. With GS, the construction of knowledge is distributed across individual learners when they engage in social discourse within the activities. Students were found to have more opportunities to participate in class discussions to share and were better able to organize their ideas by using GS. The results show that the GS classes performed better than non-GS classes as measured by traditional assessments.

介绍了一种基于三益模型的协作脚本是如何被 然科学课上的一组学生所采用的。协作脚本被置于AppleTree 系统中,学生们经历了 4 个阶段的协作学 活动: 个体构建、组内构建、组间评分和组内提炼。共有 33 名新加坡中四年级学生参与了这项研究。对学生的行为和认知进行定量和定性分析,解释了学生对协作脚本的脚本的使用情况以及影呴协作脚本使用的因素。学生的概念知识水平、课堂文化和时间是影呴学生使用协作脚本的重要因素。

Many scholars have contributed efforts to improve education in schools. A major motivation for learning scientists to develop design research as a methodology is to contribute to theory and educational practice through rigorous research without avoiding the complexities and messiness in authentic educational settings. There are many examples of successful implementation of collaborative, knowledge-construction oriented pedagogies using socio-cognitive and socio-metacognitive tools in formal and informal educational settings as well as in teacher professional development. However, there are many challenges to scaling up such innovations beyond small-scale implementation, including that of developing into “fatal mutations” (Brown, 1992). This symposium provides an opportunity for discussion and reflection on the impact that CSCL and Learning Sciences researchers have made on large-scale education reform and what, if any, may be done to extend this impact by bringing together a set of papers describing some large-scale education innovation initiatives in Asia and Europe.

For pedagogical innovation in innovative curriculum design, much attention has been paid to the importance of teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about teaching and learning. However, little research focuses on elucidating the thorough process of teachers’ sensemaking of pedagogical innovation such as integrating computational thinking (CT) into the school curriculum. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore how mathematics teachers make sense of integrating CT into the mathematics curriculum. This study employed a case-study design with 9 teachers during the 2019-2020 school year using observations of teacher professional development meetings, semi-structured interviews with the teachers, and teacher artifacts. Using Weick’s (1995) properties of sensemaking, our findings indicate that the most prevalent properties of sensemaking for the teachers in this study were social, ongoing, driven by plausibility rather than accuracy, and retrospective. These findings are important to support continuing professional development.

Innovations in teaching and learning are not merely about merely the design of technologies but the integration of technologies and pedagogical practices in supporting meaningful learning. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a web-based system to support secondary school students’ collaborative argumentation (CA) in science learning in Singapore. A pedagogical model named the Spiral Model of Collaborative Knowledge Improvement (SMCKI) is proposed in this study to inform the system and learning activity design. Starting with a stage of individual brainstorming, the pedagogical model scaffolds students to go through five stages of intra-group and inter-group knowledge improvement and refinement, to support the advancement of their collective and individual knowledge. The results showed that the students significantly improved on their scientific content knowledge through the staged collaboration argumentation activities in the web based learning environment.

Seamless learning is “when a person experiences a continuity of learning, and consciously bridges the multifaceted learning efforts, across a combination of locations (such as in and out of classroom), times, technologies or social settings.” It is an opportunity for an integration model of learning to foster deeper connections between multiple learning programs and learning opportunities. The technology-enhanced seamless learning approach was introduced to Singapore schools around 2007. After the initial proof-of-concept on the feasibility of developing a school-based, national curriculum-aligned pedagogy, a series of translation and diffusion efforts ensued over the last decade. Nevertheless, there are still challenges for the learning approach to penetrate the macro layer while keeping the focus on the meso and microlayers of the ecology. Underpinned by the notion of implementation research, this chapter will trace the evolution of the seamless learning practices among participating schools. We discuss the motivations and rationales of developing various translated seamless pedagogical models during different periods of time. In some cases, new translated models were derived not only for the sake of diffusing and spreading the practice to more subjects and levels but also for overcoming the systemic, technological and human (teacher, student and parental) tensions or limitations identified in preceding studies. Lessons drawn from a decade’s worth of implementation research can be useful in informing future translational and scaling up efforts of innovative pedagogical and curricular innovations.

Learning is interweaved into and across students’ everyday life activities. Technology that is used to support learning should be integrated with everyday life in the same way that learning occurs in everyday life: seamlessly. Mobile technologies, with their reduced size and ease of use, provide the potential to extend students’ learning spaces and enrich the learning experiences in their daily lives where they move between locations, switch from one topic or context to another, and interact with different social groups. This paper proposes mobile technology-supported seamless learning and presents learning scenarios from our research to illustrate how learning occurs seamlessly across time and places mediated by mobile devices.