David Hogan

Organizational and Personal Predictors of Teacher Commitment: The Mediating Role of Teacher Efficacy and Identification With School

This study tested a predictive and mediation model of teacher commitment. Teacher efficacy and sense of identification with school were hypothesized to mediate the relations of an individual antecedent (teaching experience) and two organizational antecedents (perceived organizational politics and reflective dialogue) to teacher commitment. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used to test and validate the mediation model across two independent samples of teachers. Perceived organizational politics was found to be negatively related to teacher commitment, whereas reflective dialogue and teaching experience were positively related. Teacher efficacy and identification with school were found to completely mediate the relations between the three antecedents and teacher commitment.

Knowledge management, sustainable innovation, and pre‐service teacher education in Singapore

In 1997, Singapores Ministry of Education (MOE) committed itself to an ambitious program of pedagogical reform in Singaporean schools in anticipation of the kind of institutional challenges – particularly those in increasingly globalized labor markets – that young Singaporeans were likely to face in the coming decades. Since then, the Ministry has designed and implemented a series of initiatives that, the authors suggest, will go a considerable distance to achieve its objectives. These initiatives focus on substantial changes in the system of ‘instructional governance’ in Singapore over the past decade, and efforts to change the pattern of classroom pedagogy. But while these represent a good start, the authors argue that these initiatives do not go quite far enough to close the gap between policy and practice. And while the improvement of classroom pedagogy in the long run will depend on the improvement of initial teacher education, it is also the case that, given what is known about the circumstances that optimize professional learning in both pre‐service and in‐service programs, the improvement of teacher education will depend substantially on the prior improvement of classroom pedagogy. How Singapore might escape this conundrum is the central focus of this paper.

Expecting the unexpected Young people’s expectations about marriage and family

Many social theorists argue that institutions such as organized religion, the nuclear family and social traditions more generally, are in a rapid and potentially terminal decline. At the same time, there has been a growing emphasis on the processes of individualization, the rise of the ‘reflexive self’, de-traditionalization and an emergent view of life as a ‘planning project’ where individuals determine their future pathways through autonomous decision-making. Some authors, such as Giddens and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that personal life, families and relationships are particularly affected by these changes, while others, such as Gross and Simmons or Smart and Shipman, advise more caution. In this article we interrogate this tension by using first-wave data from a longitudinal study involving over 7000 12–13-year-old high-school students from government, independent and Catholic schools in Queensland, Australia. In this article we provide key baseline findings on students’ expectations of marriage and family life to highlight several key issues that must be addressed by de-institutionalization and reflexivity theorists, and which illustrate the need for a more longitudinal evaluation of their claims.

Visible Learning and the Enacted Curriculum in Singapore

In this chapter we assess the intellectual quality of the enacted curriculum in Secondary 3 Mathematics and English in a large representative sample of schools in Singapore using criteria and standards identified in part by John Hattie in Visible Learning. In doing so, however, we have expanded Hattie’s particular model of visible learning to include a range of instructional practices that we believe are critical to enhancing instructional transparency and student learning. In particular, we focus on a range of standards that have the potential to ensure greater epistemic clarity with respect to the nature and cognitive demands of the knowledge work involved in the design and implementation of instructional (and assessment) tasks.

Why risk irrelevance? A translational research model for adolescent risk-taking data

Framed by the literature on research-policy transfer, this paper explores a ‘real world’ task of translating adolescent risk-taking data into ‘whole-of-system’ services development. It aims to explore challenges and opportunities in using large-N quantitative data analyses of such complex constructs to inform holistic policy-making. It offers a translational research-into-policy model developed using analyses of a dataset of 5122 Tasmanian students in Years 8 and 10. This model provides three levels of translation of the data analyses aimed at meeting the needs of holistic policy-making: broad directions for how services could be linked and/or be separate; multi-service directions targeting particular risk-taking behaviours; and constellations of interventions for specific risk-taking areas. The translational model is described with reference to specific policy decision-making challenges that are about re-imagining what services should stand alone, and what could be brought together, in what ways, and to what end. The model simplifies a complex process and is incomplete; however, it offers a basis for exploring why diagnostic models of research practice often used to consider complex challenges like adolescent risk-taking may not do enough to meet the needs of policy-makers. In so doing it raises deeper questions about research practice for the twenty-first century.

Complex network analysis of teaching practices

The application of functional analysis to infer networks in large datasets is potentially helpful to experimenters in various fields. In this paper, we develop a technique to construct networks of statistically significant transitions between variable pairs from a high-dimensional and multiscale dataset of teaching practices observed in Grade 5 and Grade 9 Mathematics classes obtained by the National Institute of Education in Singapore. From the Minimum Spanning Trees (MST) and Planar Maximally Filtered Graphs (PMFG) of the transition networks, we establish that teaching knowledge as truth and teacher-dominated talking serve as hubs for teaching practices in Singapore. These practices reflect a transmissionist model of teaching and learning. We also identify complex teacher-student-teacher-student interaction sequences of teaching practices that are over-represented in the data.

Context and Implications Document for: Assessment And The Logic Of Instructional Practice In Secondary 3 English And Mathematics Classrooms In Singapore

This guide accompanies the following article: David Hogan, Melvin Chan, Ridzuan Rahim, Aye Khin Maung, Loo Siok Chen, Seng Yee Zhe and Luo Wenshu, Assessment And The Logic Of Instructional Practice In Secondary 3 English And Mathematics Classrooms In Singapore, Review of Education, 10.1002/rev3.3002

Framing Lives: Longitudinal Research on Life Planning and Pathways in Singapore

As children become adolescents and adolescents become adults, they learn – and they have to learn – new roles, competencies, and identities. While contemporary researchers recognize the importance of biological maturation in this process, the transition of modern adolescents into adulthood is understood to be just as much, if not more, a social as a biological process (Hutson & Jenkins, 1989; Klein, 1990; Wallace & Kovatcheva, 1998). The conventional picture of modern life transitions and pathways drawn by historians and sociologists is that life pathways have become increasingly standardized, compressed, rationalized, institutionalized, and regulated by the state over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Elder, 1997; Kett, 1977; Kohli, 1986; Kohli & Meyer, 1986; Mayer, 2005; Modell, Furstenberg, & Herschberg, 1976; Modell & Goodman, 1990; Uhlenberg, 1969). Kohli (1986), for example, argues that the organization of public services, transfer payments and employment opportunities by age rendered the life course more orderly and calculable. Similarly, Buchmann (1989) suggests that the rationalization of the economy and the polity – for example, through enhancing the number of rights that individuals had access to on a universal basis, above all to education – over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries promoted the standardization and institutionalization of the life course. Contemporary sociological accounts emphasize, however, that contemporary life pathways appear to have assumed a distinctively “postmodern” rather than merely “modern” character – that they are increasingly characterized by temporal decompression and de-sequencing of key life transitions and pathways, involving greater compression of some pathways, and extensions of others, and that the life course as a consequence has become increasingly de-standardized, disordered, individualized, reversible, and fluid (Buchmann, 1989; Giddens, 1991; Kohli, 1986; Mayer, 2005). The deregulation of the labor market, ascendancy of contract work over life-long employment, the proliferation of educational duration and levels of training, the winding back