Lee, Yew-Jin

There has been a longstanding interest in the kinds of scientific knowledge that primary science learners must know and be able to do, which comprise the intellectual demands in this subject. These prescriptions chiefly take guidance from national curriculum documents, especially in the form of their learning outcomes (LO) or learning standards. Using the concepts of semantic density (SD) and semantic gravity (SG), we formulate a novel coding scheme for primary science LO based on Semantics and Legitimation Code Theory. We demonstrate how SD and SG provide insights into the levels of complexity and abstraction respectively from a mix of qualitative and quantitative criteria that we devised. We empirically test the utility of this coding scheme by comparing present reformed primary science LO with their previous versions across three East-Asian regions. It was shown that their LO were not significantly different over versions in terms of SD/SG, had typically one to two learning points, favoured more context-dependent expressions, and were predominantly coded as SD-SG+. This research provides a complementary method of determining the intellectual demands of science curricula in terms of complexity and abstraction of LO that has implications for science teaching as well as the improvement of epistemological access for learners.

The purpose of this research project is to study the development of literacy in learning Science from a Vygotskian perspective. The concept of literacy in this research project is theorized by considering the real act of communicating Science. We studied the following research questions. First, what is the role of everyday language in learning scientific language? And how does collaborative communication develop in Science class in the course of developing scientific understanding? Second, how do scientific artefacts interface with (non-) verbal communication and conceptual understanding? Third, what are the forms of literacy that increase the possibility for people to learn Science and experience their Self differently?

Does nonverbal cues increase the propensity of teachers’ instructive discourse and at the same time assesses students’ cognitive construction of knowledge? The researches that attest to the effectiveness of gestures are by far those conducted on younger children. Few of such research have been done on college students and in Science subjects. As such a randomized pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design of 14 matched pairs were tasked to watch one of the two videotaped lessons on a topic in Biology. In the video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson, the teacher produced gestures to illustrate concepts while in the video-cum-slides-only lesson the teacher did not produce any gestures. In a post-test of 10 Multiple-Choice-Questions attempted by these 28 students, students who watched video-cum-slides-only lesson scored a mean of 7.6 while students who watched video-cum-slides-plus-gesture lesson scored a mean of 6.2. 7 of these matched pairs further underwent a feedback session with the teacher while the other 7 did not. A follow up test showed that students who had feedback given scored higher and progressed from a discordant stage of gesture-speech mismatch to the concordant stage of gesture-speech match of a right concept while those without feedback regressed.

Various issues confronting science education publications that cater for non-English speaking audiences are explored. With reference to an English-medium journal that the author co-edits, two main conundrums are discussed: (1) How to serve local school practitioners in concrete ways while fulfilling the institutional goals of academia, and (2) the struggle to promote research from non-English speaking contexts against the hegemony of the English language. It is suggested that valuing difference can create much educational value and thereby allow one’s science teaching to be interrogated, evolve, and maintain its relevancy.

Teachers’ work in school is said to be under increasing pressure from neoliberal forces. Key constructs that are essential in understanding how teachers cope with these changes are teacher responsibility and teacher accountability, which are closely related within scholarly and everyday contexts although serving different logics and outcomes. By taking a constructionist approach in Discursive Psychology toward analyzing interview data, we specifically attempted to examine teacher responsibility from their talk in this study. Based on a sample of primary and secondary teachers from mainstream government schools in Singapore, it was found that they used various rhetorical strategies when talking about responsibility at work to perform a number of discursive functions such as managing identity, morality, being knowledgeable about, and reconciling the main purposes of teaching. This discourse analytic method complements as well as adds to knowledge obtained from typical qualitative content analyses regarding teacher responsibility. We conclude with some practical recommendations for improving the working conditions of teaching in school.

The paper presents a case study report of two high school students’ explanation of addition reaction during an interview. It aims to characterise students’ discourse dealing with the concepts of reaction mechanism from a multimodal communication perspective. The research addresses the following questions: (1) What roles do the different communicative modes play within students’ discourse? (2) What are the relationships among communicative modes used by the students? A theoretical framework based on multimodal communication and social semiotics which guided the analysis of the students’ discourse and the results of the analysis are presented in the paper. Implications for teaching and learning of science are also drawn from the study.

While student achievement has recently been shown to be very successful in international tests in Singapore, both qualitative and quantitative research has shown that classroom teaching here is still largely frontal, directed teaching albeit of a high quality and that students’ epistemic practices are scarce. Longitudinal studies of a “model” secondary school that adopted inquiry science practices also showed that recent reforms did not significantly improve students’ generation of new knowledge just as teaching was mainly confined to traditional methods [3]. Statistical modeling [2] has reported that the logic of teaching in East Asian contexts dictates high-efficiency content coverage in the face of high-stakes assessment regimes and societal expectations of success. The PISA 2012 report has even speculated that high content mastery by students has been a significant reason for their strong achievement in mathematics here that has compensated for fewer problem-solving skills.I claim that this situation is unsatisfactory; teachers in Singapore enjoy high levels of training in curriculum, leadership, and assessment strategies but development in the liberal education tradition appears to be lacking or unable to show itself in the classroom. This is a problem that demands a shift in thinking about what constitutes genuine learning and asks if politicians are serious about the rhetoric of effective learning in the 21st century. As a science teacher-educator, I have been experimenting with practice-based teaching, which I will share during my presentation. These have included a program where preservice teachers mentor after-school inquiry investigations with groups of pupils over a school term. Here, teachers and pupils collaboratively engage in projects whereby there are often no known answers in the textbooks although the teachers explicitly act as facilitators. Such practice-based teaching that follows the US Fifth Dimension program [1] help close the theory-practice gaps and are a viable model also for PD. As well, I share similar work done using a Microbial Fuel Cell with secondary school students and their teachers. We have much theoretical support from the ideas put forth by many from Aristotle to Durkheim, Michael Young and Paul Ricoeur about the need for intertwining abstract and practical knowledge. It is my contention that teachers in Singapore are ultimately underperforming with regard to their potential similar to a powerful car that is imprisoned in a garage and that once education (rather than mere training) is given priority, education for the young can truly advance.

While there has been a remarkable worldwide convergence in the emphases of primary science curricula over the last four decades, the cognitive and knowledge demands that they make on learners have not been well-researched. Without knowing what these intellectual or epistemic requirements are when learning science in school, issues concerning curricular alignment and access to abstract disciplinary knowledge are also likely to occur. To highlight the value of such forms of analyses, we examine the intended primary science curricula from Korea and Singapore using revised Bloom's taxonomy, as well as describe some of their general features for teaching. The results contribute insights into the complexities of the science curriculum among two similar yet different educational systems that have performed well in international science achievement tests at primary levels.