Wong, Lung Hsiang

Studies on current Chinese language classroom instructions in Singapore’s primary and secondary schools have shown that most of the curriculum time are spent on the learning of vocabulary, with teacher-centric delivery as the dominant form of pedagogy.This study aims to explore how young students’ learning of Chinese vocabulary can be carried out in a student-centric manner. Ninety-four Primary three (nine-year-old) students participated in this study. They learned vocabulary through an innovative seamless learning environment known as MyCLOUD (My Chinese Language ubiquitOUs learning Days), mediated by cloud and mobile technologies. The MyCLOUD learning experience encompasses reading of digitised textbook passages, maintaining personalised “Mictionary” (Mobile dictionary), contextualised (authentic) photo taking and sentence-making with mobile devices, sharing of student artefacts on the MyCLOUD learning platform, and online peer interactions/evaluations. Our analysis indicates that MyCLOUD can help to increase the fluency of vocabulary use among high- and medium-level academic performers (in Chinese Language). The model led to greater opportunities for meaningful learning particularly through the learning-application-evaluation trajectory. This had resulted in a positive impact on students’ abilities to appropriately apply their learned vocabularies in greater varieties of contexts. Notwithstanding, the results also show that such a self-directed model had minimal impact on low performers, as they require greater support and more guided practice in sentence-making and peer evaluation in order to achieve significant improvement in their learning.

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.

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.

The aim of this study is explore the writing performance effect of a collaborative writing approach mediated by a computer-assisted collaborative learning tool for elementary school students. To increase students "interest and performances in Chinese essay writing, we facilitated co-writing peer learning programs are executed on Tablet PCs with Group Scribbles software for students" practicing themes about Taiwan with VSPOW (Vocabularies → Sentences → Paragraphs → Outlines → essay Writing) writing model. Through the peer collaborations, the pooling of rich vocabularies and corpus, and face-to-face discussions, the students‟ motivation and quality of writing had been enhanced.

This collaborative inquiry project brings together Chinese Language teachers, curriculum specialists and researchers to co-construct Information and Communications Tools (ICT) mediated Chinese curriculum for primary school students in Singapore. The findings indicate that as the teachers were not used to voicing their concerns in free-flowing meetings, they experienced tension. However, all the participants agreed that collaborative inquiry is effective for teachers’ professional development. There were also positive changes of teachers' views about the incorporation of ICT in Chinese learning.

Studying teacher enactment of an innovation helps us understand the process of effective spread of a curricular innovation to teachers who have differing levels of content readiness, pedagogical orientations, and different student profiles. Towards this, we explore how different teachers in the same grade level appropriated a common science curriculum enabled by mobile technologies in their classrooms. As curriculum designs are not self-sufficient by themselves, the enactments of the teachers differ in how they leverage on students’ artifacts, how they integrate the technology into the class and in which way they interact with students in a mobile learning setting. We draw implications for the innovative curricula implementation and for teacher professional development of such innovations with the ultimate purpose of scaling and sustaining.

Over a year of time, we co-designed primary three science curriculum to integrate 1:1 mobile technology with teachers. The form teacher of the experimental class in a Singapore school enacted the curriculum as her regular teaching. This paper proposes a cyclic model of how to “mobilize” the curriculum in align with the national primary science syllabus. Preliminary results of the enactment are also presented.

The logographic nature of Chinese script is a major dissuading factor for learning handwriting. The challenge is the complex psycholinguistic process behind handwriting. Thus, we developed AI-Strokes, a Chinese handwriting learning tool that assists teachers in facilitating students’ handwriting practice in various modalities, and provides personalized feedback for the students. By leveraging a trainable Machine Learning back-end framework, the tool diagnoses and scores students’ handwriting errors. This paper reports a pilot study in a Singapore primary school with an early prototype of AI-Strokes. Two classes of students went through AI-Strokes-based Chinese handwriting lessons (the experimental group) and conventional lessons (the control group) respectively. Pre- and post-tests were administered, and their handwriting processes were analyzed regarding errors in stroke orders, extra/missing strokes, and errors in stroke directions. The results show that the experimental group has yielded significantly better learning gains than the control group. It is posited that the personalized feedback of AI-Strokes has formed a feedback loop to support students’ trial-and-error process in improving their handwriting skills. The multimodal handwriting task design may have also fostered their orthographic awareness through the activation of alternative psycholinguistic pathways during their handwriting lessons.

We describe one cycle of design-based research (DBR) in which we explore mCSCL through an iterative process of (re)designing and testing the learning approach with students. The mCSCL application assigns each student a component of a Chinese character and requires them to spontaneously form groups that can assemble a Chinese character. We observe the enactment of the learning design in two modes (with and without the ICT), and found the students favor the card mode over the phone mode due to their emergent trial-anderror strategy. That triggered us to examine the scaffolding strategies by exploring domain oriented theories to inform us in deciding how we should accommodate their use of the strategy. This cycle of DBR has reshaped our learning design. This paper brings to the fore the value of the interplay of theories, implementations and reflections as advocated by DBR.