Teo Chew Lee

Singapore aims to build a flexible and diverse education system to help students discover their talents, realise their full potential and develop a lifelong passion for learning. This national aspiration is grounded in the Singapore education system’s recognition of individual differences in learning and implementing a strategy in which we seek to lift the bottom while not capping the top. Just as all learners need a supportive learning environment with adequate challenge, so do gifted learners. This paper synthesises and critiques research evidence on understanding and educating gifted learners to inform policy and practice in Singapore. The paper includes elaboration on the differentiation of learning environments to develop gifted learners.

This panel aims to facilitate an exchange between scholars specialized in various technology-enhanced socio-constructivist learning approaches with the common ground of placing Student-Generated Ideas (SGI) in the center of the learning trajectory. Despite varying theoretical underpinning and socio-cognitive mechanisms, these learning approaches similarly elicit ideas contributed by individual or groups of students in diverse forms and put them into the learners’ classroom or online community space to advance their learning. Examples of such approaches are not restricted to those which will be explicated by the panelists, namely, seamless learning, knowledge building, guided student questioning, student-generated questions, ubiquitous learning log, and productive failure-based flipped classrooms, but may also encompass problem-based learning, project- based learning, computational thinking, STEM, design thinking, makers, etc. The roles of technology in facilitating and enhancing such learning trajectories will be discussed.

To better prepare learners for the "knowledge society," educators in Singapore have embarked on a journey in experimenting with knowledge creation pedagogy in classrooms. The Knowledge Creation and Innovative Design Centre was set up to further coordinate this effort. In this article, the authors give an account of the historical development of effort in sustaining and scaling knowledge building pedagogy in the past decade, and present two recent research efforts of this Centre.

Knowledge building requires collaborative bootstrapping, with participants at all levels of the education system part of a collective effort to go beyond information exchange to innovation-producing networks that demonstrate that education can operate as a knowledge creating enterprise. Organizational theories and research are increasingly focused on multilevel perspectives for creating actionable knowledge; the challenge is to take advantage of emergence to self-organize around solutions and new means. By “innovation networks” we mean networks that go beyond sharing and discussion to the actual creation of new knowledge and innovations. Self-organization and emergence surround us, all the time and at multiple levels, whether we are aware or not. However, self-organization around idea improvement is rare and requires engaging innovative capacity at all levels, a research-intensive enterprise surrounding innovations, and an open source engineering team committed to enabling new forms of interaction, media, and analytic tools. “Multi-level” envisions inclusion of students, teachers, administrators, researchers, engineers, and policy makers in a collaborative enterprise. This session takes the form of a design think tank to advance conceptual frameworks and means for new and more powerful environments to support a multi-level knowledge building innovation network.

This study investigates how secondary school students engaged in collective inquiry enriched with analytics-supported meta-discourse in a knowledge-building environment. Twenty grade 11 students in a Singapore science classroom participated; the domain of the study was photosynthesis. Students engaged in knowledge-building inquiry mediated by Knowledge Forum (KF) and enriched with learning analytics-augmented meta-discourse over six weeks. Specifically, they employed the embedded KF analytics tools, word cloud to reflect on and continuously improve their collective ideas. Findings indicated that students improved their understanding of key concepts in photosynthesis and engaged in deepening discourse moves over time. Analysis of classroom dynamics, KF reflection and artefacts revealed that with the support of KF analytics-pedagogy, students engaged in meta-discourse, rising above, deepening, and identifying emerging research areas for collective knowledge advances. Implications for how to use analytics-supported to support meta-discourse for knowledge building are discussed.

The Learning Sciences investigate all aspects of learning, key to which is a consideration of all ecological factors and establishing the ecological validity of research in authentic settings. Educational Neuroscience has surfaced micro-level evidence to the various constructs explored in the Learning Sciences but with quite distinct methodologies and interpretations. The rapid development in both Learning Science and Neuroscience research presents new opportunities to amalgamate these two fields. This workshop invites researchers from both fields to discuss the potential and gaps in the integration of the research processes, the related theoretical and methodological perspectives of these two fields. We will discuss and demonstrate methods to measure cognitive, psychological, and neurological data in an authentic Knowledge Building classroom, mapping constructs and variables to integrate the intricate research processes across both fields.

Singapore and Ontario, Canada, have been rated as among the top education systems in the world in terms of both student achievement and progressive management. This symposium brings together leaders and researchers working in these systems to discuss efforts to go beyond present achievements and to address new imperatives to educate for innovation. Both systems are experimenting with Knowledge Building as an approach to meet this need. How they propose to do this while also upholding other educational goals forms one facet of the symposium. The other facet concerns how this work fits into the larger picture of education for innovation as seen from the points of view of research in the learning sciences and OECD’s studies of innovation in education.

With the increasing concern of ability driven education in Singapore, educators need to have a better understanding of the various pedagogies that can be used in teaching and learning to ensure students achieve higher levels of understanding rather than simply being able to reproduce information. Activities such as conducting experiments, research-based work, project-based work and field trips are put in place to provide students opportunities to internalize their experiences. Group work and collaborative learning strategies were integrated into these activities to achieve mutual advancement of knowledge among the students. Technology is a possible solution to allow interaction among students as they progress with the learning in class and, at the same time, allows preservation of the community's knowledge as well as its growth. This research study examines the experience of students in a Secondary Four science class where two topics were taught using the Knowledge Building approach to encourage knowledge advancement among students. First, the study focuses on investigating how the Knowledge Building approach would impact students' advances in their learning outcome in line with the ideals of Knowledge Building; and second, to what extent do two different technologies support the Knowledge Building pedagogy. The study examines the notes and learners' feedback in the duration of use of two different online discussion forums, one of which is the Knowledge Forum, and the other is a threaded discussion board. Students' experiences and participation were analyzed. The paper also discusses the implications and practical applications for Knowledge Building in Singapore schools.

The preliminary findings showed evidence of Knowledge Building for advancing understanding of the topics assigned. The level of participation does not seem to be related to the academic ranking in class. On various occasions, the students were approaching an advanced understanding of the topic based on the idea put up and the development of the discussions. The findings also showed a significant difference in the discussion patterns seen in the control group who used the threaded discussion forum on the school e-learning portal (referred to as E-forum) compared to those using the Knowledge Forum, which affords a graphical interface and scaffolds.