Goh, Jonathan

The underrepresentation of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields is a problem that plagues many places in the world. According to the U.S., Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration (2009), women held less than 25-percent of the STEM jobs, and are disproportionately fewer women having earned STEM undergraduate degrees, especially in engineering. In the U.K. (Kirkup, Zalevski, Maruyama, & Batool, 2010), women represented less than 12.3-percent of the workforce in all science, engineering, and technology occupations. Only one in five countries in the world have achieved gender equality in research careers (UNESCO, 2012). While Singapore is well-known for its excellent student performance in international mathematics and science tests such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), women make up less than 30-percent of the total researchers in 2012 (UNESCO, 2014). This worldwide phenomenon is often metaphorically described as the leaky STEM pipeline (Blickenstaff, 2005) which posed problems for developing and developed nations looking to harness more diverse ideas, increasing the number of productive workforce, and improving the quality of women's lives. Currently, there are no published studies in the Singapore context that specifically examine how feminist approaches to STEM teaching impact girls' attitudes (e.g., interest, self-concept, STEM career and post-secondary education decisions, and participation) towards STEM, and the construction of STEM-related identities. This is a proposal for a research study about the Singapore Committee for United Nations Women, Girls To Pioneer programme, which is aimed at promoting more women and girls in STEM fields. The programme adopts feminist pedagogies in actively engaging girls to participate in diverse STEM activities so that positive attitudes towards STEM may be developed. Using pre- and post-programme surveys, lesson videos, and interviews, we examine the impact of the Girls To Pioneers programme on diverse participants' attitudes and STEM identities. The participants are girls aged between 10-15 and recruited from schools or private centres (e.g., after school study centres) that have signed up for the Girls to Pioneers programme. The findings will have implications for Singapore STEM educators as they develop greater awareness about gender inequity issues in STEM, and learn about informal STEM efforts that can help to shape girls' attitudes and constructed STEM identities so that they can also emulate and promote such efforts in their everyday teaching.

In the 1980s we witnessed the dawning of the Information Age. Today, the use of information technology has become an integral part of our lives. Education is no exception. With the introduction of Web 2.0 tools such as weblogs, students are presented a new platform for interaction and exchanging ideas. A review of the literature however reveals few empirical studies examining the relationship of the use of weblogs and student learning. Furthermore, despite the growing interest in research on blogging, researchers continue to overlook cultural variations when enumerating students’ learning benefits through blogging. As such, the purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that are of specific benefits of weblogs in student learning in an East Asian context. To determine this, principal component factor analysis was performed using standardized residuals rather than the non-linear raw scores. The findings revealed four factors, namely, efficiency, deliberation, de-personalization, and collaboration that explained students’ perceptions of the learning benefits of blogging.

Educational leadership for the 21st century calls for a new and different working relationship between educators. In addition to well-known approaches to educational leadership such as transformational, strategic, educative and organizational styles, the notion of parallel leadership is receiving much attention with growing evidence from Australian schools that this leadership style facilitates school improvement. Parallel leadership challenges teachers and members of the school management to establish a more collaborative working relationship. Such leadership entails mutualism between administrator leaders and teacher leaders, a sense of shared purpose and an allowance of individual expression and action by respective leaders (Andrews & Crowther, 2002). Nurturing parallel leadership involves a change in the roles and responsibilities of principals – to lead in metastrategic development – and of teachers – to lead in pedagogical development. Such leadership is an impetus for essential processes of schoolwide professional learning, culture building and approach to pedagogy which will enhance and sustain school outcomes, thus giving IDEAS schools a cutting edge. This enables the knowledge-generating capacity of schools to be enhanced and sustained. Based on data obtained from interviews and fieldwork observations we introduce an elaborated version of the’ black box’ (Crowther, Hann & Andrews, 2002) and provide a discussion on how three principals in Singapore schools, as part of the IDEAS project, embrace the role of ‘strategic leaders’ in the context of parallel leadership. As these principals progress with developing parallel leadership, we expect valuable insight to emerge as to how parallel leadership is functioning in these schools, thus enabling us to provide at a later stage, a more conclusive answer as to what a parallel relationship between teachers and principals looks like in the Singapore context.

Greater emphasis on helping ''students at-risk'' improve in academic achievements has become a key concern of many countries. The relatively large achievement gaps between high and lower academic groups is an educational issue, and also, a socio-political and socio-economic one as it suggests that a sector of a population is not equipped with the necessary academic qualifications, knowledge, skills, and aptitude to take on certain types of jobs and earn a reasonably good income to sustain their living. In 2008, the school dropout rate in Singapore was 1.6 percent?1 percent was attributed to secondary school dropouts of which approximately 90 percent of these students were from the Normal Academic (NA) and Normal Technical1 (NT) steams (Ministry of Education, March 4, 2008). The dropout rate has decreased over the years. In 2010, the primary one cohort which did not complete secondary school education was 1.0% (Ministry of Education, January 16, 2012). Based on the data drawn from the MOE Education Statistics 2012, NA and NT students make up approximately 29 percent and 12 percent of the secondary school student population, respectively. This research proposal for Examining Normal Academic/Technical Students' Science Learning from a Sociological and Cultural Lens seeks to investigate Singapore Normal stream students' science curriculum experiences. While most science education research focuses on mainstream Express and specialised school students, no studies have focused on how Normal Academic (NA) and Normal Technical (NT) students learn science. As a critical lens on the topic is absent, we are particularly concerned with the lack of deeper insights into the challenges, difficulties, and tensions NA/NT students' experience that may limit their interest and ability to learn science in meaningful and productive ways. The three key research questions we want to address are: 1. How do Singapore Normal Academic and Normal Technical students experience science learning in and outside the classroom? 2. How do structures shape Singapore NA/NT students' science learning? 3. How do Singapore NA/NT students' construct their science discursive identities? We have designed a research study using qualitative methods on case studies and quantitative surveys on a large purposeful sample of mainstream Singapore secondary schools and case studies (one NA and one NT class) in one school to investigate the above issues and identify support needed in the Normal stream science curriculum. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to collect generalised and case specific data. We will apply the sociological and cultural lens, specifically, the theory of agency and structure, to analyse how various cultural schema and resources in the primary and secondary structures enable or limit the students' agency. Related to this, we will also examine the science discursive identities of students using discourse analysis. The overall goal of the study is to improve the teaching and learning of science for all. The short term goal of this research is to gain deeper insights into NA/NT students' experience in science classrooms and include identifying existing schema and resources that they engage with both from within and outside the primary structure (e.g., home, institutional, and social structures) and the secondary structure (e.g., scientific discipline and practice in science classrooms) to make sense of science and to develop their science-related discursive identities. The long term goals of this research are to address current gaps in research on NA/NT students' participation in science classrooms, particularly, how they learn science, how they relate to science, their views about science lessons, the factors and forces shaping their agency, and their motivation and interest to learn and pursue postsecondary education in science-related fields. The intellectual merit of this research is to advance the knowledge base.