Wong, Lung Hsiang

This research seeks contemporary understanding of how we can develop teachers' Technological-Pedagogical-Content Knowledge (TPACK) when scaling pedagogical innovation to different contextual situations. Teaching with technology has long been a wicked problem as the nature of technology is ''protean'' (used in versatile ways), ''unstable'' (rapidly changing) and ''opaque'' (elusive backend mechanisms), resulting in multifarious complexities which are exacerbated when its use is scaled and situated within the broader socio-cultural context of diverse learning ecologies. Scaling innovations to new contexts is rarely a mere supplanting of what works at the seeding school to new pedagogic sites with less hospitable conditions. It entails the perpetual marshalling of resources to mitigate the enfolding tensions that can emanate from many incompatibilities at the new site. Herein lies the tensions of diffusion: the conflation between fidelity adherence and localised accommodation. The purpose of this research then is to study how teachers' three knowledge bases - technology, pedagogy and content - can be holistically developed so that the core ingredients of success at the seeding school can be sustained and not ''amputated'' at new innovation sites. Informed by complexity theory, the qualitative case study will employ the complexity constructs of ''distribution'', ''enaction'' and ''emergence'' to examine how teachers' epistemic resources are distributed during the knowledge creation process and how teachers leverage on TPACK to enact co-designed lessons or improvise their lessons in-situ. More importantly, by studying the diffusion process of Seamless Science Learning project from the seeding FutureSchool (ICT prototype school) to another non-affiliated mainstream primary school, the study aims to articulate how teachers' reified TPACK can emerge through feedback loops between components of TPACK and interaction with other actors in an ecological complex adaptive system. The study will also articulate the implications of such interaction on the translations of teachers' professional learning and the conceptual model related to challenges of nurturing readiness. It has the potential to inform policymakers on the theoretical principles of professional learning support which may culminate into ensuing successful uptake of innovations. By inter-meshing three domains: complexity theory, TPACK and scaling, this project can provide novel methodological perspective to how the inter-locking influences underpinning teacher's TPACK can be studied. Through cross-case analysis, the proposed study aims to reify both ''local divergence'' and the ''noncontextually bounded'' theoretical principles about scaling school-based intervention.

This paper reports a novel mobile-assisted game-based learning design for Chinese character learning. In playing the “Chinese-PP” game in a 1:1 (one-smartphone-per-student) setting, each of the 31 target students in Primary 3 (9-year-old) is assigned a Chinese character component. A student may make use of his/her own and peers’ character components to form a legitimate Chinese character, and invite the peers with matching components to join his/her group. The intention is to assist the students in developing general orthographic awareness (understanding in the structures of Chinese characters) through social negotiation. In this paper, the students’ collaborative learning processes in three game sessions were analysed. The relationships between students with varied learning styles and their game behaviours and learning gains were unveiled as a result. Through the Chinese-PP learning activities that stimulated active peer coaching and social learning, we found that all the target students became active learning participants and achieved high learning gains towards the last game session. Recommendations to the future development of such a novel learning approach will also be given.

Computational thinking (CT) is one of the skills that are critical for problem-solving in a technology-driven society. Although the importance of CT as a goal in education is increasingly acknowledged, there is scant research on developing pre-service teachers’ CT competencies so that they can integrate CT in their lesson design. In this study, drawing from the experiential learning framework, we discuss the design of a module using a novel approach that is a hybridisation of plugged and unplugged CT approaches. The aim is to facilitate pre-service teachers in making connections between CT and their teaching contexts. Thirty-eight pre-service teachers attended the CT module for twelve weeks. The results indicated that the participants developed better CT competencies by integrating, justifying and reflecting CT in their lesson design. This study demonstrates the importance of providing a practical CT module to conduct unplugged activities for pre-service teachers, especially for those without prior computing knowledge, before introducing CT in the context of programming.

Despite the consistently remarkable success of Singapore students in international assessments, little is known about the critical factors that drive their reading achievement. Much of the existing research has narrowly focused on a few relevant factors. However, since reading achievement is a complex phenomenon simultaneously determined by numerous different factors, a more integrative lens is needed. This paper aims to demonstrate the application of machine learning to determine the most critical factors that could predict Singapore students’ reading performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Based on the PISA framework, the variables were categorized into ‘student background’, ‘schooling’ and ‘non-cognitive/metacognitive’ constructs. The results indicated that the variables associated with the ‘non-cognitive/metacognitive’ constructs (e.g., metacognition and joy of reading) were deemed as the key predictors of achievement. Our study can provide valuable insights for policymakers and educators, aiding them in prioritizing factors to address in their endeavours to improve learning outcomes.

Interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is a design theory that intends to inform the design of future education in Asia. It consists of three anchored concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. This paper presents the third anchored concept habit as well as the habit loop. IDC theory assumes that learners, when driven by interest, can be engaged in knowledge creation. Furthermore, by repeating such process in their daily learning routines, learners will form interest-driven creation habits. The habit loop, the process of building such a habit, consists of three component concepts—cuing environment, routine, and harmony. The cuing environment is a habit trigger that tells the students’ brain to get prepared and go into an automatic mode, letting a learning behavior unfold. Routine refers to the behavioral patterns the students repeat most often, literally etched into their neural pathways. Harmony refers to the affective outcome of the routine activity as well as the integration or stabilization of habits; that is, through the routine behavior and action, students may feel that their needs get fulfilled, feel satisfied, and experience inner peace. It is our hope that such habitual behavior of creating knowledge can be sustained so long that students ultimately become lifelong interest-driven creators. This paper focuses on the description of the three components of the habit loop and discusses how these components are related to the interest loop and the creation loop in supporting learners in developing their interest-driven creation capability.

Appropriate design of collaborative learning activities for students using mobile devices can be supported by different forms of scaffolding provided by peers, by the teacher or by the technology. Building on prior studies in mCSCL (mobile computer-supported collaborative learning), we developed Chinese-PP, a novel in-class mobile synchronous collaborative learning game for constructing Chinese characters from components, with the unique characteristic of spontaneous small group formations. In this paper, we propose a distributed scaffolding design framework to guide us in examining and refining/revising the interplay among various forms of scaffolding in the learning model across various design-based research (DBR) cycles of our study on Chinese-PP in a primary school in Singapore. We believe a generalized scaffolding design framework has the potential to inform technology-enhanced learning research with a structure to support the iterative process of enacting and redesigning the socio-techno- pedagogical frameworks developed by individual research projects.