Seow, Peter Sen Kee

The Learning Initiatives for the Future of Education (LIFE) are outlined in this chapter with an introduction to the historical developments of education research at NIE. LIFE’s aims and goals are to support NIE’s vision as a future-ready institution up to 2025 underpinned by cultivating and being the custodian of enduring values even in a challenging milieu of change. Foregrounded by the 4 lives framework, this chapter explicates the ‘It takes a Village’ project, funded by the Temasek Foundation, and delves into how the project paves the way into enabling research-practice nexus (RPP). We discuss the potentials in the science of learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and similar trends in the light of the foundations of values, content knowledge and twenty-first-century learning. The NIE aims to be ‘Inspiring Learning, Transforming Teaching, Advancing Research’ (NIE (2020). 2020 NIE strategic vision. https://www-nie-edu-sg.libproxy.nie.edu.sg/docs/default-source/spaq/nie-2022_6pp_softcopy-final-editsp2020.pdf?sfvrsn=cbb06543_2). The above constructs are illustrated through a project referred to as ‘It Takes a Village.’ While this project is only at its first phase, we discuss how its next steps can be incorporating the concepts advocated by LIFE.

The use of mobile technology can help extend children's learning spaces and enrich the learning experiences in their everyday lives where they move from one context to another, switching locations, social groups, technologies, and topics. When students have ubiquitous access to mobile devices with full connectivity, the in-situ use of the mobile devices in different contexts may allow students to make connections to what they learn in the classroom with their daily life experiences outside the classroom. This article proposes mobile technology supported seamless learning to illustrate how learning occurs seamlessly across time and places mediated by mobile devices. The authors' approaches to nurturing a seamless learning environment are also discussed.

Singapore is a centralized–decentralized education system which recognizes that learning needs to integrate content–disciplinary understandings with twenty-first-century orientations and outcomes. Schools are given autonomy for innovations. One such initiative is FutureSchools. FutureSchools are exemplar schools with successes in technology-mediated pedagogical innovations and work with other schools to spread twenty-first-century learning practices. This chapter aims to understand how lessons learnt from FutureSchools inform the ways schools implement innovations and how context shapes innovation pathways. Lessons learnt suggest that changing practices is a social process requiring tight-loose couplings. Capacity building is key so teachers understand, enact, and adapt practices for their contexts. This chapter describes two case studies and implementation tenets for building teacher capacity to drive innovations and change practices towards inquiry: (1) creating consensus and tailoring innovation for school’s context; (2) forming communities and building capacity through lesson designs; and (3) deepening understandings through in situ enactment and refinement. Tight-loose couplings are unpacked by discussing commonalities enabling two schools to form partnerships and how context shapes adaptations and pathways. Findings are discussed to show how tight-loose couplings between and beyond schools involve multiple stakeholders from the education ecology to create leverages for innovation and change. Capacity building situated within practice enables teachers take ownership, reflect, and refine changed practices as part of everyday work.

With the prevalence of online communication in recent years, many teacher professional development (TPD) activities occur in blended learning environments which combine face-to-face (FTF) co-located experiences with online experiences. However, many scholars point out that blended learning environments need to be thoughtfully designed in order to integrate FTF learning with online learning experiences, and that there seems to be a lack of designs that pertain specifically to in-service teachers. Professional development is crucial for inservice teachers who are at the forefront of learning and teaching in the classroom. To impact student learning, deepening content knowledge and upgrading pedagogical skills are pivotal to teachers’ professionalism. Building professional development communities through blended learning environments is a core strategy for teachers to grow their professionalism, considering the multitude of demands faced by teachers, especially in Singapore. With the aim of designing more supportive and sustained TPD communities through blended learning environments, we undertook a review of the literature. This review has resulted in a five R conceptual framework. We synthesised from the literature the observation that the design and development of sustained blended TPD communities involve multifaceted and complex issues. Such communities would need to hold strong relevance for their members, encourage close relations between members, enable rich reifications of artefacts, be well recognised by important stakeholders, and lastly, be equipped with structural, digital, and human resources.

Developing and then scaling up an educational innovation so that it achieves on the dimensions of depth, sustainability, spread and change of ownership is a complex endeavor. In this paper, we present a study of one such innovation which has been developed through a design-based research process in a Singapore school. The innovation features a primary science curriculum integrating the 5E inquiry phases with the use of mobile technology. It has evolved through the various development phases to where the innovation is becoming an integral part of routine classroom practices. With the objective of examining the impact of the curriculum innovation on science teaching and learning, this paper reports some of the results of our scaling efforts, in particular, those relating to changes in classroom practices and the effectiveness brought by the curriculum innovation. Using qualitative data analysis methods, the study discusses the transformation of the classroom practices on teachers' pedagogical approaches, classroom culture, lesson plan design, linkages to informal learning, assessment methods, and parent involvement. Quantitative analysis of the performance of students in science assessments when compared between pre-scaling and scaling phases shows the efficacy of the innovation when scaled up to a whole grade level. Implications are drawn to inform future studies or work on factors for effective scaling up of technology-supported curricular innovations.

The paper presents a study on a partnership between schools, a community welfare organization, Science Centre and the National Institute of Education to design, study and implement new approaches of learning for lower track students. Singapore as an inclusive society has sought to address the diverse educational needs of children in the country. This partnership seeks to ignite students’ interest in learning Science and address the affective needs in learning, which includes developing students’ confidence, competence and social skills. Leveraging on the diverse expertise and experiences, the partners designed tinkering activities to anchor students’ learning experiences in exploring, testing and constructing Science ideas. The activities are designed and enacted with linkages to the existing Science curriculum. However, setting a partnership with stakeholders from different backgrounds and domains is challenging. We will describe the journey of setting up the partnership, developing shared goals, building capacity and knowledge, and designing for learning. Also, we will share students’ learning and affective outcomes because of the partnership and participation in the designed tinkering activities. Our goal is to highlight how meaningful partnerships can be formed to better understand and meet lower track students learning and affective needs through collective social responsibility according to the familiar proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”.

Coding for students is no longer just constrained to software and screen-based text and graphics. Students today use programmable sensors and microprocessors to solve the problems around them. The purpose of this research is to understand how students conceptualize problems and implement solutions with physical computing. Our study is driven by the following: 1) find out what Computational Thinking (CT) competencies, specifically abstraction, decomposition and algorithmic thinking, can be developed by students and 2) to what level students develop these competencies in carrying out physical computing projects. We closely observe how 41 Grade 7 students developed solutions for problems they identify in the physical world around them. Through doing so, we explore how powerful ideas of CT play a role in a project-approach to physical computing. We believe open-ended exploration through a project-approach in physical computing should reinforce practices where CT skills can grow and flourish. Our findings show that much of students’ interaction with sensors and devices is at pre-CT level, where students simply use pre-existing code fragments or templates. As students gain skills and confidence, they can be explicitly guided to develop CT skills with new projects of their own design justifying their choices. We strongly believe that Computational Modeling (CM) could help students develop their CT skills e.g. abstraction, decomposition, and algorithmic approach much more than the minimally guided syntax driven teaching approaches.

Interest in Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots has exploded across the education industry, subsequently expanding in sophistication and usage. However, students' perceptions on utilizing this technology ultimately determines how well these chatbots promote learning. Hence, this study examines the factors influencing how Singapore secondary school-aged computing students perceive using MyBotBuddy (MBB), a GenAI chatbot, to assist them with programming tasks. A thematic analysis determined that students' perceptions were influenced by reliability, utility, cognitive effort needed, satisfaction, and enjoyment. The study contributes to the literature on GenAI chatbots supporting secondary school programming students and may guide the development of such tools in secondary school classrooms more effectively.

Cognitive flexibility (CF), the ability to swiftly shift between and adapt mental strategies to navigate novel situations, has been increasingly recognized as pivotal in classroom learning. Traditional behavioral measures tend to oversimplify the CF construct, mainly reducing it to set-shifting (i.e., attention switching within a task) or task-switching (i.e., alternating response between tasks) skills. However, recent literature has suggested that CF may encompass a wider range of abilities (e.g., adaptability to changes in the environment). To address this gap, we are adopting a unified framework that embraces a broader perspective and employs a serious game (SG) to assess CF within an educationally relevant, problem-solving context. By designing a serious game, we aim to provide a platform for an ecological assessment of CF skills within a problem-solving context. Our goal is to use game elements to enhance participant motivation, and to infuse educational relevance into assessments, thereby bridging the gap between psychological testing and real-world application.