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…

South Australia's PISA performance has been in constant decline since 2003 with the proportion of PISA participants meeting the Australian national proficient standard dropping from 73% (in 2003) to 50% (in 2018). In contrast, Singapore is a consistently strong performer. To better understand student readiness in answering PISA questions, this…

Because there has been very little past research into gifted students' science learning environments, especially in Singapore, we selected from four established questionnaires six learning environment scales that are consistent with Van Tassel-Baska and Stambaugh's guidelines for gifted education. These scales were modified slightly to enhance…

Climate change is an important theme in the investigation of human-environment interactions in geographic education. This study explored the nature of students' understanding of concepts and processes related to climate change. Through semi-structured interviews, data was collected from 27 Secondary 3 (Grade 9) students from Singapore. The data…

Networked learning provides opportunities for learners to develop their critical thinking, an important 21st century competency, through dialogue with fellow learners to consider other perspectives and negotiate and critique ideas and arguments. However, much extant literature has not examined networked learning environments among younger learners…

This article presents an instructional strategy called Premise-Reasoning-Outcome (PRO) designed to support students in the construction of scientific explanations. Informed by the philosophy of science and linguistic studies of science, the PRO strategy involves identifying three components of a scientific explanation: (i) premise--an accepted…

Against the backdrop of half a century of research in mathematics problem solving, Polya's last stage is especially conspicuous--by the scarcity of research on it! Much of the research focused on the first three stages (J.M. Francisco and C.A. Maher, "Conditions for promoting reasoning in problem solving: Insights from a longitudinal…

An instructional program using four simulation applets was used to facilitate understanding of gas and liquid pressure concepts among twenty-two students in a Year 9 class from an independent secondary school in Singapore. A comparison group consisting of twenty-two students was taught using traditional didactic, chalk-and-talk instruction.…

This paper examines learning of science in 15 grade nine classrooms by analyzing the type of talk that teachers engaged in. Using transcripts from audio recordings that are part of the Singapore Corpus of Research in Education database, annotations were carried out on the phrases of teacher talk using Mortimer and Scott's framework for meaning…

Researchers are skeptical about the role of authoritative sources of information in a constructivist learning environment for fear of usurping students' critical thinking. Taking a social semiotics perspective in this study, authoritative sources are regarded as inscriptions of cultural artifacts, and science learning involves meaning-making of…

This paper presents case studies of two teachers at Crescent Girl's School (an all-girls high school in Singapore) who implemented strategies learned through a teacher professional development program called 21st Century Learning Design (21CLD). Policymakers often state requirements for teachers to focus on 21st century (21C) competencies without…

This paper proposes the identification and use of principle-based pedagogical patterns to help teachers to translate design principles into actionable teaching activities, and to scaffold student learning with sufficient flexibility and creativity. A set of pedagogical patterns for networked Second language (L2) learning, categorized and…

One way of implementing project-based science (PBS) is to use problem-based learning (PBL), in which students formulate their own problems. These problems are often ill-structured, mirroring complex real-life problems where data are often messy and inclusive. In this article, the authors describe how they used PBL in a ninth-grade biology class in…

This case study involved year 9 students carrying out project work in biology via problem-based learning. The purpose of the study was to (a) find out how students approach and work through ill-structured problems, (b) identify some issues and challenges related to the use of such problems, and (c) offer some practical suggestions on the…

This project describes the trialling of a new form of cooperative learning strategy, in the form of a game known as "EcoRangers". "EcoRangers" is a multi-player game designed to run on mobile phones, written specifically for education. "EcoRangers" is one of the first, if not the world's first, instances of this…