Koh, Elizabeth

Creativity, collaboration and critical thinking are recurrently featured in contemporary global learning frameworks as capacities essential to 21st century (21C) living and thriving. While these competences have long been upheld as integral to human progress, they were historically regarded as expressive affordances and educational aspirations ascribed to more elite groups in society. However, in today’s knowledge economies characterised by complexity and rapid change, these no longer remain the province of the privileged, but are central to one and all’s productive participation in local, global and virtual societies. This is now more of an empirical fact than rhetoric. Economists have shown in a suite of recent studies that cognitive academic skills only account for 20 percent of labour-market outcomes, while 21st century skills such as collaboration and creativity emerged as much stronger drivers of workplace and life success (Levin, 2012).
Yet, there is little doubt that the dynamic and non-linear nature of 21C skills and their constitutive interactional processes are posing significant challenges to conventional practices of teaching and assessment today. Despite notable international efforts in the teaching, learning and assessment of collaborative and creative problem-solving skills in recent years, clear empirical insights that illuminate the relationships between students’ creative competencies and their problem-solving success on ill-defined collaborative tasks remain elusive.
Our research project aimed to address this knowledge gap by turning the lens of inquiry towards the interactional dialogic processes through which Singapore secondary school students accomplished their collaborative and creative problem-solving tasks online. By (i) using secondary data generated from the international Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) research programme’s Singapore school trials that captured student-pairs’ chat logs as they jointly solved ill-defined problem tasks online, and (ii) drawing from theoretical and methodological advancements in the fields of creativity and computer-supported collaborative problem-solving (CPS), we sought to first develop and validate a discourse-based analytic framework for characterising and measuring collective creativity (CC) competencies; then to explore the empirical relationships between CC competencies and collaborative problem-solving (CPS) success among Singapore secondary school students.

WiREAD+ is an augmented web-based collaborative critical reading and learning analytics environment that was developed to scaffold and engage students in collaborative dialogue around online texts. This paper reports on the trial of WiREAD+ for Grade 9 students in two high schools – School 1 (S1) with prior experience and School 2 (S2) that was new to the intervention design. We report on a cross-case analysis of the two schools, focusing on perceived ease of use and usefulness for learning, and reflect on the value and challenges of enacting WiREAD+ across schools of varying prior experience. Drawing from the findings of this cross-case analysis, we consider how we can support the wider adoption and deployment of the system across schools and settings by highlighting obstacles that new participants who might trial such new learning analytics systems might face.

In the emerging field of learning analytics (LA), actionable insight from LA designs tends to be a buzzword without clear understandings. Student engagement is commonly measured in LA designs and used to inform actionable insight. Moreover, in K-12 education, where the teacher is a key stakeholder, what teacher-actionable insights can be derived from LA designs? Towards providing greater clarity on this issue, we concretize a taxonomy of LA decision support for teacher-actionable insights in student engagement. Four types of decision support are conceived in this taxonomy with relevant teacher implications. Through this taxonomy, we hope to offer possible pathways for actionable insight in LA designs and make clearer the role of the teacher.

This paper foregrounds teacher practitioners’ implementation experiences and reflections of a web-based Collaborative Video Annotation and Learning Analytics (CoVAA) intervention aimed at enhancing video-based teaching and learning in schools, with a view to foster secondary students’ conceptual understanding, social knowledge construction, and self-regulated learning dispositions. We first briefly outline the key learning principles that underpin the design of CoVAA, namely social dialogic learning, assessment for learning, and computer-supported collaborative learning. Next, we explain its two key learning affordances: (i) timepoint-based collaborative video annotation supplemented by a live interactive chatboard, and (ii) rapid digital formative feedback in the form of teacher and learner dashboards. We then illustrate how teachers implement these in their classrooms. Teachers’ sense-making of the learning and teaching gains, challenges and pathways forward for leveraging on these contemporary digital social learning affordances to enhance video-based classroom practices are presented and discussed.

WiREAD+ is a web-based collaborative critical reading and learning analytics environment to scaffold learning and motivate students to develop richer dialogue and quality interactions with peers around multimodal texts. This paper reports on the pilots to scale up the use of WiREAD+ beyond the original context of Secondary School English Language (EL) learning to three distinct educational settings, namely, EL in a primary school, English Literature in a junior college (pre-university), and a tertiary-level Discourse Studies course. We report on learners’ perceptions in response to the use of the system and reflect on the potential and challenges in scaling up the system across different educational contexts, specifically on the three augmentations to the system which we have designed to improve its scalability readiness. Drawing from the findings of the pilot studies, we briefly discuss how we can support the wider adoption and deployment of the system across schools and settings.

In the "WE Learn Project" at Nan Chiau Primary School, a smartphone-enabled seamless learning curriculum was employed to support the Ministry of Education's Masterplan 3 goals in primary schools. Using a snapshot perspective, this paper presents analyses and findings from the first trial curriculum unit in Primary 3 English. Briefly, the functional snapshot shows that the smartphone-enabled curriculum enhanced the academic achievement of students compared to the traditional worksheet based curriculum.

Many pedagogical models in the field of learning analytics are implicit and do not overtly direct learner behavior. While this allows flexibility of use, this could also result in misaligned practice, and there are calls for more explicit pedagogical models in learning analytics. This paper presents an explicit pedagogical model, the Team and Self Diagnostic Learning (TSDL) framework, in the context of collaborative inquiry tasks. Key informing theories include experiential learning, collaborative learning, and the learning analytics process model. The framework was trialed through a teamwork competency awareness program for 14 year old students. A total of 272 students participated in the program. This paper foregrounds students’ and teachers’ evaluative accounts of the program. Findings reveal positive perceptions of the stages of the TSDL framework, despite identified challenges, which points to its potential usefulness for teaching and learning. The TSDL framework aims to provide theoretical clarity of the learning process, and foster alignment between learning analytics and the learning design. The current work provides trial outcomes of a teamwork competency awareness program that used dispositional analytics, and further efforts are underway to develop the discourse layer of the analytic engine. Future work will also be dedicated to application and refinement of the framework for other contexts and participants, both learners and teachers alike.

Teamwork is an important competency for 21st century learner. However, equipping students with an awareness of their teamwork behaviors is difficult. This paper therefore aims to develop a model that will analyze student dialogue to identify teamwork indicators that will serve as formative feedback for students. Four dimensions of teamwork namely coordination, mutual performance monitoring, constructive conflict and team emotional support are measured. In addition, the paper explores multi-label classification approaches combined with feature engineering techniques to classify student chat data. The results show that by incorporating linguistic features, it is possible to achieve better performance in identifying the teamwork indicators in student dialogue.