Tan, Aik-Ling

Teacher noticing patterns offer insights into in-the-moment decisions and actions of teachers that have a direct impact on students’ learning. However, research on differences between novice and expert teachers’ vision in lessons remain limited. Using a mobile eye-tracker, we collected and analyzed data from two science teachers. Findings showed that the expert teacher focused her attention on relevant information across the classroom, while the novice teacher’s attention was restricted to specific problematic areas. As a work-in-progress, this paper provides valuable insights that we can build onto existential work for further studies.

One of the goals of inquiry-based teaching and learning of science is for students to learn the processes of inquiry and to apply these processes in new situations to construct new knowledge for themselves. Very often, students who are exposed to inquiry activities encounter conceptual conflicts that do not align with their pre-conceived ideas. How these conflicts are resolved provide different types of learning experiences for the learners. Interaction talk during hands-on science inquiry activities provides a good source of information on how students deal with conceptual conflicts and, in particular, how they apply inquiry skills to resolve these conflicts. The analysis of talk in interaction amongst a group of six grade five students in a Singapore school has surfaced at least three ways whereby students construct and shape their learning in an inquiry-based science activity through the ways they deal with conceptual conflicts: (a) domineering voices in a group can prematurely curtail alternative ideas and concepts in dealing with a conceptual conflict; (b) a peer expert in a group can scaffold learning for a student facing a conceptual conflict; and (c) learners draw on inquiry skills to resolve cognitive conflicts arising from anomalous results or behaviours during hands-on investigations.

Research on argumentation has increased our understanding of knowledge construction, group learning, and scaffolding structures in CSCL although analyses of argumentation pose many difficulties. This could be due to the many theoretical positions that can be taken when approaching discourse data. In this paper, we use three popular analytic methods (interactional, content-specific, and linguistic) to compare the same fragment of scientific argumentation by Grade 4 children in Singapore. We show the complementary emphases and strengths of each disciplinary position as well as their weaknesses. The results imply that analytic methods arising from different disciplinary positions can potentially broaden our overall understanding of using argumentation in CSCL.

This study used three previously validated instruments, namely Science Academic Hardiness (SAH), Students’ Conceptions of Learning Science (COLS) and Science Learning Self-Efficacy (SLSE) on 431 Singaporean students. Using structural equation modeling, results showed that the SAH commitment dimension a positive predictor explaining both the reproductive (e.g. science learning as memorizing or testing) and constructivist (e.g. science learning as understanding or seeing in a new way) conceptions of science learning as well as all dimensions of students’ self-efficacy among high school students. It was also found that the SAH control dimension is a positive predictor for explaining the SLSE science communication dimension but is a negative predictor for explaining reproductive COLS. Finally, only students with constructivist COLS had significant associations with all SLSE dimensions. These findings suggest that students’ personal commitment to learning science is an important aspect to cultivate since it has the ability to predict conceptions of science learning and self-efficacy. Further, creating opportunities for students to be engaged in learning through constructivist ways—such as designing tasks to help students understand and see phenomena in new ways and occasions for students to apply their science knowledge to solve science problems—is likely to lead to positive self-efficacy in practical science work, science communication, and everyday applications of scientific knowledge. Additionally, students’ engagement in reproductive ways of learning science—such as memorization, testing, and calculating and practicing—could be reduced since these do not contribute to building students’ science learning self-efficacy.

This forum paper offers alternative insights into Pei-Ling Hsu’s “It’s a magic circle”! Using cogenerative dialogues to create a safe environment to address emotional conflicts in a project-based learning science internship. In her paper, she presented how cogenerative dialogues can be used to create an emotionally safe environment for conflict resolutions in a project-based science internship program. She examined the emotions during the cogenerative dialogues using the polyvagal theory. Here, we continue the discussion by raising alternative perspectives to view the events, particularly the “Lucy incident” that was described. We suggest the use of emotional regulation strategies such as situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change and response modulation as a means to enhance the way cogenerative dialogues could be carried out. The main argument on this commentary is that strong emotions cannot be dismissed if cogenerative dialogues are used as a means to resolve conflicts. Rather, participants in cogenerative dialogues need to apply specific emotional regulation strategies so that they can contribute and participate in cogenerative dialogues more constructively.

STEM education and research has gained popularity internationally over the last decade. However, there is a lack in specifications in existing K-12 STEM classroom observation protocols of how features of an integrated STEM experience/lesson would lead to desired outcomes and how those outcomes should be measured. To bridge this gap, we propose the development of a new integrated STEM classroom observation protocol (iSTEM protocol). This article describes the ongoing development work of the iSTEM protocol, which features two creative attempts. Firstly, the productive disciplinary engagement framework is adapted to design a classroom observation protocol that provides a coherent frame of design principles to be met to achieve desired 3-dimensional pedagogical outcomes. Secondly, interdisciplinarity of student engagement was interpreted in terms of the extent to which students take a systematic and disciplinary-based approach to make and justify decisions during STEM problem-solving. The iSTEM protocol comprises 15 items (4-point scale) rated holistically for the extents to which evidence was found in the observed lesson for (1) the 3-dimensional pedagogical outcomes of productive interdisciplinary engagement (five items) and (2) problematising, resources, authority, and accountability design principles (10 items). The accompanying iSTEM profile visually represents and communicates the strengths and inadequacies in design principles, thus providing explanations for extents of students’ productive interdisciplinary engagement. The iSTEM protocol will contribute as a research tool for STEM education researchers and as a pedagogical guide for STEM classroom teachers to improve their design of STEM learning experiences.

This paper presents initial findings from an ongoing ethnographic study carried out among Normal Technical students from a secondary one class in a typical neighbourhood school since the start of the 2005 school year. Assertions about the social organization of the classroom and how this relates to teacherstudent interaction provide us a window into some of the classroom management issues and conditions for learning that emerge in the N(T) classroom. Specifically, this paper focuses on the perspectives of the students in the program. The ‘silent’ lot, although a minority, is a group of students that needs to be helped so that they can become productive and contributing individuals to the society at large. They need to be given equal learning opportunities to enable them to maximize their learning potential.