Munirah Shaik Kadir

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.

Studies indicate primary school students' interest and attitudes towards science decline as they progress into the secondary years. Experience shows that Singapore students are no exception. Knowing these students’ perceptions of science and understanding of science concepts should help in developing pedagogical approaches and lesson packages that will address the decline. Therefore, in our on-going study data are collected from students of six secondary one classes in a school in Singapore to learn of their views of science, reasons for liking or disliking science and their understanding of the topics in the science curriculum before and after instruction. This is done for a range of physics topics in their science syllabus. In this paper, we report the preliminary findings on the topic “Forces at Work” consisting of two sub-topics, ‘Moment of Force’ and ‘Work Done’. We group our findings into three main categories, ‘Students’ Perceptions’, ‘Students’ Preconceptions’ and ‘Students’ understanding of concepts’. Among the early findings are 1) students are confused between the two concepts of ‘Moment of Force’ and ‘Work Done’ 2) students are concerned about having to memorize a lot of information and solve many quantitative problems 3) students prefer to be given opportunities to carry out experiments as a means of verifying physics concepts to theory lessons where information is passed on to them verbally, and 4) students are good at using keywords as reasoning without actually understanding what they mean. This study surfaces key issues in understanding these young students’ learning journeys in the world of science. As such, the results from this research can guide curriculum development. We will be developing a curriculum that take into account these research results and the constraints of the school.

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.

Despite extensive research on vulnerable children and youths in school (commonly known as students at-risk) little has been done to uncover the stressors, wellbeing, interests, and school engagement of these students within the primary school level (aged 7 to 12). This study examined different domains across these constructs to develop a profile of at-risk primary school students. A total of 343 at-risk and non-at-risk students aged 10 to 12 years old were recruited from a Singapore primary school to complete online survey questionnaires. Quantitative results showed lower levels of emotional wellbeing and physical health, as well as higher levels of frustration in several constructs of psychological needs and school engagement in the at-risk group. Interestingly, these students reported better social wellbeing, especially in teacher relationships. These findings can be triangulated alongside responses in the structured interviews to create a profile that can guide the design and development of suitable at-risk programs to help the struggling at-risk students.

In this paper, we focus on students’ understanding of the concepts relating to buoyancy: namely, (a) the level of displaced liquid as being dependent on the volume of the object that is submerged in it, and (b) density as a characteristic property of a material which is unaffected by its size. The study used a pretest-posttest control group design. The students were secondary one (grade 7) students. Due to limitation of time, the data in this paper were derived from analysing two classes (N = 72) out of six in the experimental group which experienced the PbI1@School curriculum, and two classes (N=80) out of five in the control group which were taught using the traditional approach. We used two pretests to probe students’ preconceptions of the two concepts (a) and (b) stated above. The common preconceptions identified from students’ answers in the pretests include: the idea that mass and/or weight of the object and the depth at which an already completely immersed object is placed below the surface of the liquid affect the level of displaced liquid. Another common preconception is the idea that the mass/weight of the object determines its buoyancy (i.e. whether it will sink or float). From the reasoning seen in their responses, it was clear that many students, prior to instruction, were not able to distinguish between the concepts of mass, weight, volume and density. Results from our analysis showed the effectiveness of the adapted inquiry-based materials and instruction in developing student conceptual understanding. A good understanding of the common student preconceptions and how instruction can be designed and facilitated to help students resolve their preconceptions to better learn the concepts would be beneficial to physics teachers in secondary school.

Physics by Inquiry (PbI) by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington is a research-validated self-contained, laboratory-based curriculum designed to help teachers teach physics in a way that engages students in the process of science. But could the success of the PbI curriculum and approach for teacher reparation be transferred to effective learning of physics for the secondary students in our local context? This paper describes our attempt to do so in the research project PbI1@School. It outlines the development and trial implementation of a guided inquiry curriculum and approach adapted from PbI for delivering lessons on Speed and Density in the secondary one science classroom in Singapore. The 3-year project to be done in three phases take into account factors such as the existing syllabus content, the availability of time, identified student learning difficulties from specially-designed pre-tests, students’ and teachers’ experiences in learning and teaching by inquiry, and school resources. The paper also discusses the challenges and modifications made to the pilot curriculum package to support the research site school’s effort to implement the curriculum package for all its 11 secondary one classes with about 440 students.

We report our research findings on Singaporean student understandings of a topic in modern physics – the photoelectric effect, discuss the possible basis of their understanding, and suggest ways to improve their understanding of this topic. This on-going research involved four junior colleges (JC). The level of the treatment of this topic in JC is similar to that of an introductory undergraduate course. The research was done using pre-test, tutorial instruction and post-test on experimental and control groups in each JC. It was found that there is a significant improvement in the experimental group over the control group for both categories of questions i.e. conceptual questions which are less familiar to our students and questions which are typical of the GCE A-Level exams.

Students come to formal science instruction with prior ideas or preconceptions concerning natural objects and events. Preconceptions serve as a platform from which students interpret their world. In most cases, preconceptions differ from scientific notions and if they are not confronted in formal instruction, a diverse set of unintended learning outcomes and alternative conceptions occur. In this paper, we report on some of our findings on secondary one express stream students’ ability to solve problems on speed before intervention, as well as students’ performance after intervention. These findings were a part of our 3-year PbI1@School study, which is an on-going research project with an autonomous school in Singapore, to develop and validate effective inquiry-based classroom materials and instruction for secondary one students in the Singapore science classrooms. We attempt to answer the following research questions in this paper: 1. Are the students able to make calculations involving ‘average speed’? 2. Are students able to represent speed in terms of a strobe diagram? Our pre-tests findings revealed that even though most of the students (73%) were able to use the formula for speed and perform the calculations involving average speed correctly, their level of understanding of speed as “distance per unit time” remain questionable as they had problems representing speed in terms of position drawings in a strobe diagram, with only 5% success rate. The findings from the pre-tests have guided our research team in coming up with a curriculum package that comprise hands-on activities, follow-up sessions, classroom activities and homework. The positive post-test results from the 2011 intervention have motivated the research team to share our intervention strategies with more schools in Singapore and even educators around the world.