Tan, Aik-Ling

The Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) encourages teachers to engage in continual professional development to keep abreast of the latest developments in research that inform teaching, learning, and assessment. Teachers can participate in formal and informal programmes to upgrade their knowledge and practices inside and outside classroom teaching. This book chapter focuses on the repertoire of opportunities available to Singapore science teachers to support them in their progression into established professionals. Besides short-term courses, obtaining a Master’s degree is yet another way to build the professional capacity of the teaching workforce. Investing time to pursue a Master’s degree requires commitment and, more importantly, support from the school leaders and MOE. In this chapter, we show how different routes to obtaining a Master’s degree and the different funding sources available to them. Bespoked professional development for teachers also come in the form of research partnerships that empowers teachers more than mere participation. Here, we describe the different projects that science teachers have embarked on to gain firsthand experience in research. Action research is popular among science teachers and has created opportunities for them to present at professional meetings such as conferences. In summary, this book chapter offers insights into how the Singapore science teaching fraternity builds up its human capabilities through committing time, effort, and many other resources into engaging teachers in research to support their evidence-based practices. In the process, these science teachers progressively develop into established professionals.

STEM education, when perceived as integrated learning that encompasses knowledge, skills and practices of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, points to a need to re-examine ways of classification of school subjects and learning. Consequently, dilemmas related to integrated STEM education arise. School leaders are faced with the task to organize teams to address issues such as the ownership of STEM, identity issues such as STEM teacher or teacher of STEM subjects, evaluation of STEM programs and resources to support STEM education. The unique characteristics of integrated disciplines demand leaders who understand the unique characteristics and demands of each discipline and to apply them to build a synergistic platform to magnify the similarities and harness the differences for learning. In this paper, we present an argument for STEM leadership to focus on building STEM teachers’ agency, identity and sense of belonging to a community. These three aspects are important for meaningful planning, enactment and sustainability of STEM programs since teachers’ beliefs, intentions, actions and empowerment are known to be instrumental in the success of many educational reforms.

Using the S-T-E-M Quartet instructional framework, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) activities were designed with biology as the lead discipline. These activities are centred around a problem related to vertical farming that is complex, persistent, and extended. Through engagement in these problems, students learn the vertical knowledge of each discipline as well as how the knowledge from each of the STEM disciplines are connected. We call the latter the horizontal connections. In this chapter, we describe three key aspects of learning with integrated STEM activities ? (1) How the activities are planned, (2) Student interactions during these activities, and (3) The outcomes of engagement with these activities. We will then conclude with discussions on the implications for future STEM education.

This study examines the epistemic discourse and the understanding of epistemology of teachers teaching general science at the lower secondary level. The secondary science curriculum in Singapore is designed in a spiral manner and is written as outcomes statements. These outcomes focuses on the content of science that students are expected to learn at the end of each school year. In secondary schools, science teachers are trained as specialists in various sub-disciplines of science such as biology, chemistry, and physics. These specialist science teachers can potentially be deployed to teach lower secondary science that is designed as general science with all the three sub-disciplines coming together to form one subject. As such, biology-trained teachers will have to teach chemistry and physics, while physics-trained teachers will also have to teach biology and chemistry. Anecdotally, this has resulted in some levels of discomfort as teachers are uncertain of scientific content that they are not trained in. These practical difficulties experienced by teachers teaching general science seemed to concur with the theoretical idea that while all the three sub-disciplines of science falls under the large umbrella of science, there are subtle but important differences among them. Based on Biglan’s (1973) ideas of disciplinarity, while academic subjects are classified into categories of similar ways of thinking, there remained degrees of differences between these categories. This is because the sub-disciplines of sciences, from biology (soft) to physics (hard), give different emphasis to what constitute evidence and placed different prominence on the use of specialized vocabularies. The differences between knowledge structure in biology, chemistry and physics can also be viewed from a sociological perspective. In Bernstein’s (1999) ideas of horizontal and vertical discourses, biology show more features of a discipline that has more traits of everyday local knowledge with more diffused vocabularies while physics is characterized by specialised knowledge and vocabularies.

This project sits at the nexus of pedagogies and human physiological changes during learning. Recent evidences from neuroscience research suggest that there exist intricate relationships between affect and learning. In the proposal, affect include emotions, moods, and emotional climates. Emotions are intense, short lived, and highly conscious affective states that typically have a salient cause and great deal of cognitive content whereas moods are relatively low-intensity, diffuse, and enduring affective states that have no salient antecedent cause and there little cognitive content. (Forgas, 2001, p.15) Emotional climate refers to the collective state of emotional communion among students in a class (Tobin et al. 2013). Stress pertaining to emotions of fear, anger and disgust (Lerner, Gonzalez, Dahl, Hariri, & Taylor, 2007) is one of the affect that is experienced during learning. Stress has been implicated as one of the major contributor to depression, anxiety and heart diseases. An individual's response to stressful situation varies and hence identifying and understanding stressful situations during learning can serve to improve students' learning experiences. Beyond the traditional methods of using self-reported psychometric instruments (such as questionnaires and interviews) to assess stressful situations, technologies can provide critical in-the-moment information about individual physiological changes during learning. Relevant technologies include analysis of facial and/or audio expressions of a person, and biometrics such as oximetry to measure pulse rate and blood oxygen level. These technologies afford both real time analysis of data for instant visualization of information, as well as a record of the information for review after the instructional or learning event.

This study reports students' perceptions of learning the physics concepts of equilibrium through making Bulan kites. The Bulan kite encompasses indigenous knowledge related to the teachings and ideas found in Islam. After a workshop where students (n = 109) made the Bulan kite under the tutelage of a local expert, students (n = 12) were interviewed to distil their thoughts of the learning experience and their understanding of the concepts. The interviews were transcribed and content analysis was carried out. The findings indicate that students were able to make connections between the ideas of equilibrium and the art of kite construction which is based on indigenous knowledge. The kite making process also presented students with opportunities to be more aware of the value of local indigenous knowledge and motivated them in physics learning. We also discussed how indigenous knowledge can be incorporated meaningfully into physics learning.

This article presents an empirical study of the use of Indigenous knowledge of the Bulan kite to teach the concept of “equilibrium” among Muslim students (n = 109 students) in private Islamic schools (in the southern part of Thailand). The design of the culturally responsive teaching comprising three lessons was guided by the 5E model. The study took 7 months from creating three lesson plans and a pre- and post-test until it was implemented in the physics classroom. A pre- and a post-test with 40 multiple-choice items were used to assess students’ understanding of equilibrium. A hypothetical model of the construct was validated using a dichotomous Rasch model. To measure learning gains, we fixed the pre- and post-item difficulties and estimated the post-instruction person’s ability. The Welch t-test was used to compare the means of pre- and post-instruction person ability. The results indicated that the Rasch model fits the data well. The hypothetical model was confirmed. The successful students showed the person measures with a statistically significant increase (p < 0.01) at the end of the intervention (M₂ = 1.061, SD₂ = 0.64) compared to the person measures before the implementation (M₁ =  − 0.001, SD₁ = 0.591). The implications for learning progression of students are discussed.

The role of language in science learning and teaching has been a focus of science education research for over three decades. This rich body of research has led to the insight that learning the language of science is constitutive of learning science: simultaneously with participating in classroom activities and conversations, describing observations and constructing conceptual understanding, students must begin to appropriate the language of science.