Humanities education in Singapore at the secondary level emphasises the inquiry-based learning pedagogical approach to engage students, inculcate critical thinking skills, and achieve the necessary knowledge and skills outcomes stipulated by the national curriculum. Inquiry-based learning is structured by a Humanities inquiry cycle involving four…

The impact of Augmented Reality (AR)-based science learning on cognitive development has been established, but the effect of AR on the improvement of students' academic performance remains inconclusive. Additionally, while epistemic beliefs as a significant determinant on student learning outcomes is well-documented, there is little research in…

Inspiration from 'Confessions of a Shopaholic' led this team to explore how comics can be used for mathematics instruction about percentages. In this article, the authors describe how they conceptualised and developed a teaching package that uses comics to teach percentage concepts to Grade 7 students (age 13 to 14) in Singapore. It goes on to…

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study that has been implemented by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) since 1995. This proposed study is aimed to identify the affective factors contributing to eighth graders' science achievement in TIMSS…

Declining academic performance, along with a growing apathy of students toward the value of education, demonstrates that students in the United States public education system do not recognize the value of a positive experience in middle schools. A plethora of research and writing has been done on elementary schools and secondary schools, but…

This study seeks to understand the "what" and the "why" of student engagement by investigating the "aims" that students pursue through engagement (i.e., their achievement goals) and the "reasons" driving such engagement (i.e., their motivation). Self-report instruments measuring students' motivational…

Motivational constructs and students' engagements have great impacts on students' mathematics achievements, yet they have not been theoretically investigated using international large-scale assessment data. This study utilized the mathematics data of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2011 to conduct a comparative and…

A total of 136 eighth-grade math students from 2 Singapore schools learned from either productive failure (PF) or vicarious failure (VF). PF students "generated" solutions to a complex problem targeting the concept of variance that they had not learned yet before receiving instruction on the targeted concept. VF students…