Tang Wee Teo

Chemistry education research trends: 2004–2013

This paper presents findings from a content analysis of 650 empirical chemistry education research papers published in two top-tiered chemistry education journals Chemistry Education Research and Practice and Journal of Chemical Education, and four top-tiered science education journals International Journal of Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Research in Science Teaching and Science Education from 2004–2013. We found that empirical chemistry education research (CER) papers accounted for 7.7 percent of the publications in the four science education journals. The most highly published area of research was in conceptions and conceptual change and most studies adopted mixed methods. The majority of the studies were conducted in higher education contexts and in the United States. Researchers who publish prolifically in the field included Vicente Talanquer, Derek Cheung, Michael Sanger, Keith Taber, Melanie Cooper and Marcy Towns. Current research trends and gaps are illuminated and possible future work in CER is discussed in the paper.

Building Potemkin schools: Science curriculum reform in a STEM school

‘Potemkin schools’ is used as the phrase to capture what a US science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) public speciality high school becomes as a result of its institutional branding. By way of an examination of the efforts of one teacher drawn into school branding through his ‘inquiry-based reform’ of an Advanced Chemistry course, this paper illuminates the tensions between the rhetorical intentions to engage in curriculum innovation and the reality of constraints and conflicting goals. The teacher, unable to resolve the tensions, was pushed into formalizing and routinizing his ideas into a reform project without understanding what was behind the rhetoric of the school’s self-image statements. The need to find and develop a ‘language’ to talk and think about ‘inquiry-based’ reform and its processes in meaningful terms and not in slogans is discussed. The irrationality and complexity of the reform which emerged from the findings contrast with the rationality of building Potemkin villages, hence illuminating the complexity in curriculum reform in STEM schools.

Singapore Science Education

Singapore is a small country with a total land area of about 716 km2 and a population of about 5.4 million, comprising 3.8 million citizens and permanent residents and 1.5 million foreigners. Apart from her deepwater harbour, the only other natural resource that Singapore has is her people, so the education and development of the people is crucial to the prosperity and progress of the country. Thus the education system in Singapore aims to help the young to discover and develop their talents and potential to the fullest, and cultivate a passion for lifelong learning. To achieve these aims, the educational system is becoming more flexible, diverse and broad-based, and these characteristics are also reflected in the teaching and learning of science in Singapore. The science curriculum, from the primary to high school levels, is centred on science as inquiry and focusses on the knowledge, skills and processes, ethics and attitudes required in the practice of science, as well as the understanding of the impact of science in daily life, society and environment. It seeks to cultivate the scientific literacy, competencies and values necessary for the young to take on challenges, present and future, and thrive in a fast changing world.

Affordances of Purposeful Play

According to the Singapore Ministry of Education Kindergarten Curriculum Framework (Ministry of Education, Singapore, Nurturing early learners: a curriculum framework for kindergartens in Singapore. Retrieved on January 15, 2016 from http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/preschool/files/kindergarten-curriculum-framework.pdf, 2012), purposeful play is a pedagogical approach to actively engage children in exploring, developing, and applying knowledge and skills in an enjoyable manner. To achieve this broad objective, lessons have to be purposefully planned by taking into consideration children’s interests and abilities. This chapter describes a group of Singaporean preschool children (aged 6) learning about ways to categorize different types of leaves through purposeful play at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. We discuss the affordances of purposeful play in this naturalistic learning context as illuminated through the teacher-student and student-student social interactions. Through this work, we want to demonstrate how purposeful play, when properly planned and capitalized on, could contribute to children’s science experiential learning and understanding. Preschool teachers may be interested to learn how they can purposefully plan their lessons to create diverse affordances for children. This study also contributes to the early childhood literature, which has limited empirical studies about Singaporean preschool science education.

Rethinking teaching and learning of science inference competencies of lower track students in Singapore: a Rasch investigation

ABSTRACT Competency in making inferences is an important aspect of student learning in the twenty-first century, for making better-informed decisions. The purpose of our study is to investigate the type of science capital that can predict the science inference competencies of lower track students. Science capital comprises diverse social capital, cultural capital, and mental schema. A total of 1,397 Normal Academic (NA) and 637 Normal Technical (NT) Grade 7 students from 37 public secondary schools in Singapore participated in the study. Three separate science inference tests were administered to the students over one academic year, and test scores were calibrated and equated using Rasch analysis. The relationship between students’ perceptions of science capital and their development in science inference competencies was investigated using Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis. The results indicated that NA students’ self-views in science learning and their views about the nature of science were significant predictors of their scientific inference competencies. For NT students, their views about science teachers was the only significant predictors of their performance on making scientific inferences. Based on the research design and findings, we draw implications for local and international science curriculum policy. Additionally, we demonstrate the usefulness of Rasch analysis.

An Investigation of Singapore Preschool Children's Emerging Concepts of Floating and Sinking.

ABSTRACT Despite Singapore’s excellent science achievements in international benchmark tests such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), little is known about Singaporean children’s (aged 4-8) emerging science conceptions as formal science schooling begins at Grade 3 (aged 9). This paper builds on the well-established literature on preschool children’s emerging conceptions and play to illuminate children’s ideas about floating and sinking. Using narratives of a 90-minute activity involving a group of Singaporean children aged 6, we surfaced emerging conceptions that an object floats or sinks due to its weight, and that objects sink because water is “soft”—a conception that has not been reported in previous literature. We also observed a shift from binary discourse about floating and sinking to more graded descriptions (e.g. “sink a bit”) as the children played more. The play-based activity provided opportunities for the children’s emerging conceptions to be elicited because it was conceptually-oriented and created opportunities for social interactions. It allowed children who were not proficient in standard English to express their thinking in actions. In sum, this paper illustrates how play-based contexts could be used to identify children’s emerging conceptions.

Affordances in School Science Research

This chapter examines narratives written by two former students of a Singapore specialized science and mathematics school, Frontier Science High School, FSHS, (a pseudonym). In addition to the core subject-based curriculum, the school offers a complementary science and mathematics curriculum to develop students’ research, innovation, and enterprising capacities over the six years of schooling.