Melvin Chan

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.

Preparing Students for the Twenty-First Century: A Snapshot of Singapore’s Approach

The teaching and learning of twenty-first century competencies in Singapore schools began with a vision in 1997. The Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) vision initiated a series of educational reforms to strengthen thinking and inquiry among students, preparing them for learning and working in the twenty-first century. The momentum generated from the TSLN vision led to the development of the Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes which articulates the twenty-first century competencies that will be nurtured in schools – civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills, critical and inventive thinking, and communication, collaboration and information skills. This chapter narrates the policies and approaches that were central to TSLN, specifically on the structural and curricular changes, the re-perception of teaching and learning and a redefinition of the role of teachers. TSLN, which captures the central ideas of preparing students for the twenty-first century, was never conceived as a programmatic change in that it did not contain an explicit set of intervention strategies and targets. TSLN was an entire systemic effort encompassing the policy, cultural, curricular, assessment and professional learning arenas. TSLN recognised that Singapore can no longer depend on large structural fixes to transform the education system. Instead, any refinement has to be at the nexus of teaching and learning, be reflexive and responsive to students’ needs and interests, and create new opportunities and learning experiences dynamically in and out of the classroom. Bringing about transformational change in teaching and learning requires honest recognition of issues of implementation in the classroom. Significant reductions of the national curricular content took place to make time and space for student inquiry approaches. The role of teachers was examined and rebalanced – while recognising the importance of the teachers’ role to tell, instruct and demonstrate, there was also an imperative for teachers to teach less, so that students learn more. Teacher-preparation and in-service professional learning programmes were re-designed to build teachers’ capacity to develop students’ twenty-first century competencies and give a greater emphasis to teacher-initiated learning.

The importance of career clarity and proactive career behaviours in predicting positive student outcomes: Evidence across two cohorts of secondary students in Singapore

Abstract As twenty-first century careers become more flexible, interest-oriented, and self-directed, the clarity of career goals alone is no longer sufficient. To better prepare students for the future world of work, engagement in proactive career behaviours is essential. The present study investigated the predictive relationships of career goal clarity, proactive career engagement, and positive student outcomes across two large-scale samples of Secondary students in Singapore. Among 16-year-old students, 10% (n = 1,166) have not decided on their career goals while the proportion was 22% (n = 867) among 15-year-olds in Study Two. Structural equation modelling indicated positive effects of career clarity on proactive engagement and students’ confidence in future outcomes (Study One). Study Two extended the findings by examining a different outcome variable – inventive thinking. Consistent results from both studies extend the external validity of the measures used. Across both studies, engagement in proactive career behaviours acts as a psychosocial buffer against low career clarity in the attainment of positive student outcomes. As proactive behaviours involve intentional self-regulatory processes that lie at the cornerstone of motivational and self-cognitive social theories, the findings of this research may well generalize to other research domains in terms of how the regulation of goals influence positive outcomes.

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