Self-regulated learning, reflective thinking, and meta-cognition have been given greater emphasis in Singapore's education system as central to the development of 21st century competencies and lifelong learning capacities. This study explores students' perceptions of their Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) strategies in Secondary Social Studies after…

In many Singapore schools, there are large class sizes comprising about thirty to forty students in each class. In such large classes, the opportunities for interactions between teachers and their students and among students can be limited, especially when teacher-centred, didactic teaching practices are adopted. This small-scale research project…

This paper was part of a larger study to examine one primary and one secondary teacher's classroom. The study analysed the classroom discourse to describe the types of interaction and illustrate how the teachers used talk moves to mediate talk for learning science around visual representations (VRs). The study employed ethnographic approaches to…

Translating Neuroscience to education involves providing accurate and simplified information about neuroscience to teachers. The aim of this research was to understand if providing translated abstracts from neuroscientific articles helped teachers understand content more thoroughly. Surveys, experimental manipulation, and focus group discussions…

We suggest that prior to school entry, our earliest "teachers" and "learning settings" --that is, our parents, caregivers, and homes--provide signals about our environmental conditions. In turn, our brains may interpret this information as cues indicating the types of environments we will likely face and adapt accordingly. We…

Educational research has been at the forefront of educational transformation by examining how learning occurs and enabling ways of learning notably through designing and implementing learning innovations. However, learning innovations are complex. There are multiple embedded contexts involving classrooms, schools, communities, homes and the wider…

Since the formal introduction of mindfulness-based practices (MBPs) into clinical settings in the late 1970s, a growing body of research has demonstrated their benefits in diverse settings, from clinical programmes, business and sports, to education. Along with the development of standardised mindfulness-based programmes in the areas of clinical…

A secondary school in Singapore incorporated twenty-first century learning into their science curriculum through an inquiry-based Integrated Science module. This study examines Secondary 2 students' perceptions of twenty-first century learning through this module. Through pre- and post-study surveys of 227 students and focus group interviews with…

Using a qualitative case-study approach, this small-scale pilot study explores the potential challenges and opportunities faced by early childhood educators in their first year of implementing a dedicated Outdoor Learning Environment (OLE) at their school. Participants include two Kindergarten teachers working at a large international school in…

This case study presents how teachers from an elementary school in Singapore design learning for their students, leveraging on the use of information and communications technology (ICT). The school in this case study is one of the eight future schools in Singapore under the FutureSchools@Singapore programme. The school provides one-to-one…

While the Silicon Valley aphorism would encourage all involved in design to 'fail early so that one can succeed earlier', such a concept may be hard to translate to classroom instructional strategies, especially due to the negative connotations of failure in school settings. Failures in design serve a somewhat distinct purpose from failures in…

This study investigates the change in teachers' design beliefs and their development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) through a course designed with the Scaffolded TPACK lesson design model. To achieve these aims, an adapted scale for teachers' design beliefs and TPACK is created and validated. The study reveals significant…

A key thrust of education reform is the spread of innovative ideas and practices oriented toward school improvement and advancements in student's deep learning and teacher's professional development. Framed within concepts of scaling and diffusion, trajectories of innovation spread can afford explanatory and predictive understandings of adoption…

This paper addresses how twenty-first century learning cultures can be enabled and spread in the Singapore school system by enacting curricular innovations and developing teachers' capacity for adaptivity. We appropriate understandings of adaptivity, including adaptive expertise, and contextualize it to the Singapore school system at the…

I advance a theoretically and empirically-grounded case for designing for and learning from failure, and instantiate it in a learning design called Productive Failure (PF). I describe the key mechanisms and the design principles of PF. The PF learning design comprises a generation and exploration phase followed by a consolidation and knowledge…