Koh Ruilin, Elizabeth

Teamwork is an important competency for 21st century learner. However, equipping students with an awareness of their teamwork behaviors is difficult. This paper therefore aims to develop a model that will analyze student dialogue to identify teamwork indicators that will serve as formative feedback for students. Four dimensions of teamwork namely coordination, mutual performance monitoring, constructive conflict and team emotional support are measured. In addition, the paper explores multi-label classification approaches combined with feature engineering techniques to classify student chat data. The results show that by incorporating linguistic features, it is possible to achieve better performance in identifying the teamwork indicators in student dialogue.

In 2011, the Ministry of Education (MOE) embarked on a study of five Integrated Programme (IP) schools, and sought to find out how the IP had enabled students to achieve the intended outcomes as well as the unique characteristics of IP students. Since the study was done seven years after the IP was incepted and there was no comparison group of students in the same school that had gone through an O level programme (OP), it was difficult to attribute the outcomes to the IP. It is possible that the outcomes could be due to the quality of that IP intake or it might be that the outcomes had already been achieved in those schools prior to the IP. Since 2013, more schools have started to offer IP. This study involved four of the new schools, namely: Pawai School (PS), Istana School (IS), Marina School (MS), and Sentosa School (SS). Besides the IP, these schools also offer the O level Programme, and OP students were included as a comparison group. A fifth school, Ujong Junior College (UJC), also participated in the study as it receives students from three of the schools after Year 4.

In the emerging field of learning analytics (LA), actionable insight from LA designs tends to be a buzzword without clear understandings. Student engagement is commonly measured in LA designs and used to inform actionable insight. Moreover, in K-12 education, where the teacher is a key stakeholder, what teacher-actionable insights can be derived from LA designs? Towards providing greater clarity on this issue, we concretize a taxonomy of LA decision support for teacher-actionable insights in student engagement. Four types of decision support are conceived in this taxonomy with relevant teacher implications. Through this taxonomy, we hope to offer possible pathways for actionable insight in LA designs and make clearer the role of the teacher.

In the United States, the Interstate Teacher Assessment Consortium (InTASC) Standards and Education can be generally defined as a process of receiving and providing systematic instruction, and it embodies the verbal and nonverbal networks that the stakeholders (e.g., teachers and students) co-construct. Recent years witness an increasing interest in employing network science approaches to explore the interconnected and non-linear developmental process of education. The current review starts with a brief discussion on the nature of the educational data and proceeds with an introduction to network science history. Relevant network analysis approaches and terminologies are synthesized. Three case studies in Singapore are used to demonstrate how network science approaches can be employed to conceptualize daily educational issues. The findings of the three studies with network science approaches (e.g., motifs detection) may offer educators, researchers, and policymakers novel insights into better pedagogy and strategies for learning face-to-face or online.

Towards gaining a better understanding of the field of the Learning Sciences, this research investigates the research trends over 10 years. It also compares the Learning Sciences with the closely related academic fields of Educational Technology and Educational Psychology. A content analysis is performed on 5187 journal articles drawing from 12 top journals from 2003 to 2012. This content analysis was semi-automated and guided by an initial theoretical frame. The results reveal that research trends in the Learning Sciences have remained largely consistent except in the area of individual differences and affect, which has increased over the years. Key strengths of Learning Sciences include research on small group learning, inquiry, problem solving, argumentation, and mixed-methods. As the LS reflects on its state of practice, it should recognize that the field has achieved many research distinctives, yet, there are several opportunities for further research growth.

Teamwork is an important life skill and competency for 21st century learners. It also contributes to effective learning teams. In this exploratory study, we examine the different levels of team effectiveness and describe the varying patterns of teamwork competency dimensions from students’ online problem-solving chatlogs. We employed two types of measures for a holistic understanding of team effectiveness, namely, task performance scores and learners’ perception of how effective they are as a team. Teams were categorized into four levels of team effectiveness based on the measures. A content analysis of teamwork competency dimensions was also performed. Our findings revealed the need for balance in teamwork competency behaviors for effective learning teams. Insights from the findings could lead to design principles for interventions to nurture teamwork competency in our 21st century learners.

Teamwork is one of the core competencies for the 21st century student and it is important to promote the development of the skills needed in teamwork. In this study, we continue the development and trial of a techno-pedagogical tool My Groupwork Buddy (MGB), designed to support student teamwork awareness, reflection and growth. The system has been trialled with students in two Secondary Schools, involved in collaborative inquiry tasks. Employing design-based research, we focus on the latest two trials of MGB. Drawing from feedback obtained during the study, we refined and evaluated MGB with its related design principles. The continued enhancement of MGB through iterative trials has enabled the evolution of a platform capable of supporting the formative assessment approach of teamwork growth for 21st century students.

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.