1,721,003 research outputs found
Related Data for: Assessing lower track students' learning in science inference skills in Singapore
No full textIt is a generally held view amongst educators today that the development of students’ inference skills is an important aspect in their education as 21st Century learners as it requires higher order cognitive competences. Oftentimes, students in the lower tracks are considered slower learners and may have difficulties with the development of such skills. There is, however, limited empirical evidence to support such claims. As a result, there is a lack of understanding how such skills are taught, and how lower track students acquire them. The purpose of this study is to investigate lower track students’ science inference skills over one academic year, to better understand their learning and development. To determine this, three multiple-choice science inference skills tests were developed based on science syllabus and administered over a 9-month period. In total, 1,397 Grade 7 lower track (i.e., Normal Academic) students from 38 Singapore secondary schools participated in the study. The students’ performances were determined through three equated tests using Rasch common-item procedures. The results showed that students experienced greater difficulty with tests over time. They particularly had difficulties with questions pertinent to graphs, tables, diagrams, or charts, or required them to extend their thinking beyond the given information. They also had difficulty in deducing answers using the elimination technique, and items that involved experiments and variables. Items that involved pattern recognition, concluding using range, application of a given concept, and limited information were easier for them. The findings also have implications for science teacher education in terms of assessment literacy, and the science teaching of lower track students
Related Data for: Investigating the instructional leadership of STEM educators in Thailand
No full textThis article reports on the survey findings of a study on the STEM leadership of 134 STEM middle school educators (118 teachers and 16 principals) in Thailand who led in STEM curriculum writing and teaching in their schools. The data were analysed using Rasch analysis of three constructs, namely, their views about STEM teaching, STEM capital and self-empowerment to teach STEM lessons. The findings showed that the educators generally responded positively to the three constructs. They thought that STEM should be integrated and could potentially stand alone as an independent discipline. The teachers wished for more resources and had the support of colleagues. The teachers lacked confidence in STEM teaching. Implications for specific areas of support, especially the forming of STEM professional learning communities to support the teachers, are suggested
Related Data for: Rethinking teaching and learning of science inference competencies of lower track students in Singapore: A Rasch investigation
No full textCompetency 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
Exploring ‘The Thinking Behind the Doing’ in an Investigation: Students’ Understanding of Variables
No full textRecent curriculum developments emphasise that scientific practice involves understanding about evidence. The concepts of evidence have been identified as ‘the thinking behind the doing’ and have been validated as a knowledge base underpinning this understanding, and we contrast this conceptual approach with the widespread ‘process approach’ in which the understandings may be implicit. One aspect of understanding is the validity of design and its underpinning variable structure. This small-scale exploratory questionnaire study, conducted with over 150 lower secondary school students from a school in Japan, enabled us to explore students’ understanding of variables. Some items were answered well, suggesting students’ competence with the ideas addressed, but interestingly a comparison of items that targeted similar understandings identified different responses. We tentatively suggest that the differences may be explained by students approaching the items from a ‘doing’ perspective – they may be imagining the stages they may go through, as if they were conducting the investigation – rather than from a ‘thinking behind the doing’ perspective wherein they would draw on their understanding of evidence, and specifically their understanding of variables, to respond to the items
STEM education from Asia: Trends and perspectives
No full textAsia is the largest continent in the world. Five out of the top ten high performing economies in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 are located in Asia. Why do Asian students perform so well in STEM-related subjects? This book answers this by examining the STEM education policies and initiatives in Asian economies, as well as the training programmes undertaken by STEM teachers in Asia.
The book is broken into four sections, each accompanied by a passage of commentary that summarizes the key takeaways of the chapters. Section one focuses on STEM policy environments and how various countries have developed policies that promote STEM as an integral part of national economic development. Section two focuses on STEM teacher education in the Philippines and Thailand, while section three focuses on STEM curriculum design, context, and challenges in four Asian economies. The fourth and final section focuses on presenting snapshots of STEM education research efforts in Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore.
Written by Asian academics, this book will provide valuable insights to policy makers, educators, and researchers interested in the topic of STEM education, especially in the Asian context.
Chapters 7 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.co
Representations of nature of science in new Korean science textbooks: the case of ‘scientific inquiry and experimentation’
Full text linkNature of science (NOS) is becoming a core component of both science education research and curriculum policy around the globe. In particular, how textbooks should portray NOS aspects have been of keen interest to science educators. This chapter outlines the background and motivations for Korea’s new compulsory subject, scientific inquiry and experimentation (SIE), and analyses how textbooks for this subject present NOS aspects using historical episodes. The aim is to help textbook authors and policymakers by examining the opportunities and challenges of Korea’s new NOS curricular initiative. The results indicate that textbooks tend to focus on the cognitive and epistemic characteristics of science, with a limited representation of social and institutional NOS aspects. While textbooks often included multiple NOS aspects that underlie each historical episode, in most cases, these aspects were only implicitly addressed without proper cues for students’ reflection about them. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for textbook authors and science teachers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Junior college students' alternative conceptions of redox processes in electrochemistry
No full textThere is increasing interest in the research of alternative conceptions in electrochemistry as it is ranked as one of the most difficult topics in chemistry (Garnett & Treagust, 1992a, b). This study is the first to be carried out within the Singapore context which specifically diagnoses students' understanding in electrochemistry. It aims to identify Singapore junior college students' alternative conceptions of redox processes in electrochemistry. Its primary purpose is to bring the curriculum planners', teachers' and students attention to the existence of alternative conceptions on electrochemistry, so as to improve the teaching and learning of this topic.This study replicated and extended the research done by Garnett et. al. (1995), Sanger and Greenbowe (1997a, b), Ogude and Bradley (1994) and other researchers. A list of conceptual and propositional knowledge statements adapted from previous studies by Garnett and Treagust (1992a, b) helped to identify the knowledge base necessary for students to understand electrochemistry. Alternative conceptions that had been reported in several other studies were also consolidated to give a more comprehensive list of alternative conceptions related to electrochemistry.The list of conceptual and propositional knowledge statements and alternative conceptions provided the framework for the development of an open-ended questionnaire which was administered to about sixty second year junior college students (17 to 18 years old). This was followed by semi-structured interviews with four selected students to further probe their understanding of electrochemistry.The alternative conceptions identified in the study were very similar to those identified in previous related studies. The areas of alternative conceptions surfaced from this study include the charge law, electric current, standard half-cell, current in an electrochemical cell and charges on the electrodes of electrochemical cells.Interestingly, one new alternative conception was surfaced from this study :The electrodes of the electrochemical cell must be placed in two solutions of different concentrations.The study also revealed that the textbooks used in junior colleges may be inadequate teaching and learning materials. The two highly recommended A-level textbooks by Briggs and Ramsden were scrutinised and found to have excluded content knowledge that would aid in the understanding of electrochemistry. In addition, they were found to contain information that could mislead students and cause them to develop alternative conceptions. Some of these information include stating that the charges assigned to half-cells were identified from their positions in the diagram and assigning oxidation numbers by changing covalent bonds into 'electrovalent bonds'
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