Caleon, Imelda S.

Creativity, collaboration and critical thinking are recurrently featured in contemporary global learning frameworks as capacities essential to 21st century (21C) living and thriving. While these competences have long been upheld as integral to human progress, they were historically regarded as expressive affordances and educational aspirations ascribed to more elite groups in society. However, in today’s knowledge economies characterised by complexity and rapid change, these no longer remain the province of the privileged, but are central to one and all’s productive participation in local, global and virtual societies. This is now more of an empirical fact than rhetoric. Economists have shown in a suite of recent studies that cognitive academic skills only account for 20 percent of labour-market outcomes, while 21st century skills such as collaboration and creativity emerged as much stronger drivers of workplace and life success (Levin, 2012).
Yet, there is little doubt that the dynamic and non-linear nature of 21C skills and their constitutive interactional processes are posing significant challenges to conventional practices of teaching and assessment today. Despite notable international efforts in the teaching, learning and assessment of collaborative and creative problem-solving skills in recent years, clear empirical insights that illuminate the relationships between students’ creative competencies and their problem-solving success on ill-defined collaborative tasks remain elusive.
Our research project aimed to address this knowledge gap by turning the lens of inquiry towards the interactional dialogic processes through which Singapore secondary school students accomplished their collaborative and creative problem-solving tasks online. By (i) using secondary data generated from the international Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) research programme’s Singapore school trials that captured student-pairs’ chat logs as they jointly solved ill-defined problem tasks online, and (ii) drawing from theoretical and methodological advancements in the fields of creativity and computer-supported collaborative problem-solving (CPS), we sought to first develop and validate a discourse-based analytic framework for characterising and measuring collective creativity (CC) competencies; then to explore the empirical relationships between CC competencies and collaborative problem-solving (CPS) success among Singapore secondary school students.

The impact of two cryogenics-based enrichment programmes (CBEPs) held in out-of-school setting on the learning of science concepts and attitudes towards science was evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. The findings presented in this study are based on a sample of 531 Primary Five and Six students from six schools in Singapore who had their class enrichment lessons at the Snow City.

In general, students reported large significant learning gains immediately and two-weeks after their CBEP experience. The learning gains in relation to the CBEP involving liquid nitrogen remained stable after around two weeks but those for the participants of the CBEP involving liquid oxygen slightly waned. About 93% of the participants of the former and 88% of the latter reported cognitive test scores above pretest level around two weeks after their respective CBEP experience. Greater learning gains due to participation in either CBEP were recorded for EM1 than for EM2 students. CBEPs did not have any differential impact on the learning gains of boys and girls.

Regardless of gender and stream, CBEPs produced fairly significant improvements in the attitudes towards science of the participants, specifically in relation to enjoyment of science and motivation to pursue science careers; however, no significant change was detected in the participants' perceptions of the social implications of science. Although satistical tests revealed that the retention of the said attitudinal gains did not occur for most if the students who took retention test, 13 to 20% of such students were found with at least a three-point improvement in scores in the given attitude areas. A substantial proportion of the participants shifted from negative or neutral responses to positive responses for at least two items in both enjoyment of science and career preference subscales two weeks after participating in CBEP. The contents of such items point to the possible "ripple effects" of CEBPs in the participants' future activities that could eventually lead to better achievement and more stable attitude change.

Learning gains derived from CBEPs were found to be basically determined by academic ability while attitudinal gains were predominantly influenced by initial attitude towards science. EM1 students have greater propensity to learn more from CBEPs than EM2 students. These who have initially more positively attitude towards science tend to maintain or improve such level of attitude after experiencing CBEPs. Gender did not have any significant in determining the cognitive and affective benefits that students derived from CBEPs.

Additionally , positive association bewteen post-CBEP attitude towards science and learning of cryogenics-related concepts was detected. The causal direction of the association appears to be from attitude towards cognitive: meaning positive attitude leads to greater learning gains and not the other way around.

At least 92% of the subjects liked the CBEPs covered in this study and expressed willingness to attend similar programmes in the future. The students expressed recognition of both entertainment and educational value of the programmes. The CBEPs appeared slightly more appealing for females than males for EM1 than EM2 subjects of the study. The complexity of the topic and the degree of students participation are two factors that are of importance in relation to the likeability of a particular CBEP.

This study served as an appraisal of Snow City's CBEPs, as well as a pioneering work on the evaluation of cryogenics-based programmes. Its results have provided empirical evidence that Snow City can be venue for a novel learning experience that can generate positive cognitive and effective impact on students. The findings of this study have shown that CBEPs can benefit the majority of its participants, at least for upper primary students, regardless of gender and academics ability.

Though the bulk of students’ learning takes place in the classroom, it should not be restricted in there. The rich experience from the bigger classroom – the outside world, can complement and help to foster learning inside the formal classroom. Such experiences are given partial structure in the form of enrichment activities. In this paper, the potential of cryogenics-based activities, that is, activities involving the use of low temperature fluid such liquid nitrogen, in augmenting and fostering learning among school students, is explored. The study was based on a visit by a school group to Snow City for science enrichment lessons. Results show that novelty is an effective stimulus for promoting learning. Indeed, the field of cryogenics is a perfect embodiment of novelty. The brain-based learning paradigm is used to elaborate how novelty in the learning experience promotes outright learning from the enrichment and how such learning can be utilized to facilitate or reinforce formal learning. Aside from the cognitive gains, cryogenics-based science enrichment programs are also shown to be strong in the affective realm, an area that can resonate towards future learning endeavors in the formal classroom and affect career decisions of students.

This study reports on the development, validation and application of a four-tier multiplechoice (4TMC) diagnostic instrument, which has not been reported in the literature. Each 4TMC item has a stem that is followed by the content tier, reason tier, and confidence tiers. The content tier and reason tier measure a respondent’s content knowledge and explanatory knowledge, respectively. The confidence tiers separately measure a respondent’s confidence in the correctness of his or response for the content tier and reason tier. The 4TMC test focused on waves, and was accordingly named the Wave Diagnostic Instrument (WADI). Using several indicators, the reliability of WADI was found to be low to moderate for the content and reason tiers, and moderate to high for the confidence tiers. The validity of inferences about students’ conceptions on waves that were derived from scores on WADI was fair to moderate.

The participants of the study were 931 upper secondary students from the Express and Special stream of 11 co-educational mainstream government schools. They took WADI after they were formally instructed on waves. Mean scores and mean confidence for the content tier were higher than those for the reason tier. The vast majority of the respondents were found to have an inadequate grasp of the topics tested. The students’ mean confidence was slightly above the neutral level. The students who have higher scores in WADI tended to have higher confidence levels (r=.28 to .35, p<.0001), and to have higher academic achievement (r=.28 to .43, p<.001). The students’ academic achievement was found to be weakly correlated with their confidence and confidence bias. The confidence levels of the males were statistically higher than those of the females (t> 4.61, p<.0001), but the test scores of both gender groups were found to be comparable. Confidence and test performance tended to increase when students are familiar with (i.e., formally instructed about) the concepts tested (t>2.95, p<.004).

The students were generally overconfident (i.e., their mean confidence level was beyond what was warranted by the accuracy of their responses), with males tending to be more overconfident than the females. The ability of students to discriminate between what they know and what they do not know, in terms of confidence, was low and was not significantly affected by their academic achievement and gender.

Fifty-eight alternative conceptions (ACs) were expressed by at least 10% of the sample, of which 24 were espoused confidently. Thirteen ACs were applied by more than 50% of the sample at least once. Seven ACs were expressed with high confidence, with the highest confidence being associated with ACs about the role of air in sound propagation and the graphical representation of waves. Six of the nine ACs that were associated with more than one item of WADI were found to be consistently applied by at least 10% of the sample; of these six ACs, two were consistently applied with confidence by at least 10% of the sample.

The students’ confidence ratings obtained using the 4TMC version of WADI was found to be statistically higher than those obtained using a content parallel three-tier version (which requires one confidence rating for both content tier and reason tier responses) of WADI (t=2.83, p<.05).

This three-wave longitudinal study underscores the importance of identifying elements in school settings that can help academically at-risk students--those who are likely to follow a trajectory of low achievement or academic failure-- to develop academic resilience. The study utilised both quantitative (i.e., survey questionnaires and standardised achievement tests) and qualitative (i.e., open-ended questions and semi-structured interviews) approaches, and focused on two subject domains--English Language (EL) and Mathematics (Maths). The participants of the study were 1305 students from 22 schools in Singapore. These students were considered as potentially at-risk academically as their aggregate scores in the Primary School Leaving Examination were lower than the cohort’s mean score. From this pool of students, students facing different levels of academic risk (i.e., low, moderate and high) in EL or Maths were identified on the basis of their school grades and scores in standardised achievement tests at the end Secondary One (S1). Low language or numeracy proficiency on entry to secondary school, which is a critical transition phase in students’ life, was considered as a significant risk factor that can directly predispose students towards continued poor academic performance in later years.
The profiles of the students in the three risk groups were compared in relation to their background characteristics and the focal variables of this study: socio-emotional strengths (i.e., emotional awareness, empathy, goal setting, social competence, and emotional regulation), academic motivation (i.e., amotivation, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation), perceived relatedness with teachers (i.e., student-to-teacher communication, teacher trust and teacher alienation), and perceived teacher autonomy and competence support. The results of the study suggest that, compared to students facing low academic risk, students facing high academic risk tended to report lower emotional awareness, goal setting and perceived teacher support; and higher amotivation, teacher alienation, and student-to-teacher communication. These variables can be considered as potential foci of interventions that can be implemented before or at the beginning of secondary school in order to preclude students from facing high levels of academic risk or to mitigate the effects of academic risk factors.
This study applied a dual approach in defining academic resilience. Using a trait-based approach, subjective academic resilience was defined as the students’ capacity to effectively handle challenges, adversities, pressures and setbacks in school setting; it was measured using students’ self-ratings on items acting as indicators of trait-based or dispositional form of academic resilience. Using a process- based approach, objective academic resilience was defined as the achievement of positive academic outcomes despite the presence of challenging situations or risk factors (i.e., low achievement on entry to S1). In this study, a positive academic outcome is assessed in Secondary Three (S3): It corresponds to at least a passing grade in EL (or Maths) and/or a score in standardized achievement tests in Reading (or Maths) above the 23rd percentile of the norming population.
Focusing on objective academic resilience, high-risk students who achieved positive academic outcomes in S3 were considered as resilient, and those who remained at a high-risk status were considered as less resilient. Compared to the less resilient students, the resilient students tended to report a greater improvement in goal setting, emotional awareness, and student-to-teacher communication and had a more stable perceived teacher trust over three years. The resilient students tended to have lower amotivation and teacher alienation than their less resilient peers. There were also indications that the resilient students were more competent in setting goals and in working towards their goals; they also tended to frame failure and deal with failure more positively, and to report receiving more competence and relatedness support than their less resilient peers. The key sources of support that helped students deal with academic challenges were mainly peers, followed by family members and teachers.
The results of the study also indicate that student-to-teacher communication and students’ goal-setting ability (particularly, a positive change), perceived teacher competence support, and students’ emotional regulation were the most consistent positive predictors of academic resilience in both objective and subjective forms. The aforementioned factors were found as significant predictors of academic resilience more consistently and strongly in relation to EL than Maths.

This study utilized multiple data sources to examine the pedagogical content knowledge, beliefs and practices of beginning and experienced physics teachers in the context of teaching electricity. The more experienced teachers expressed greater awareness of their students’ conceptual difficulties, but only when they have sound understanding of canonical ideas on electricity. Regardless of experience, several teachers had limited awareness of the students’ conceptual and procedural difficulties in relation to electricity concepts that are difficult to understand, such as potential difference. Beginning teachers tended to focus more on the conceptual aspect while the experienced teachers focus more on the mathematical aspect of the students’ conceptual difficulties.