Systems Research in Singapore: Creating a Dialogic Space for Research, Policy, and Practice

• In Event: Innovating Learning and Teaching in a Centralized Education System: Potentialities and Problematics

Abstract

By any measure, Singapore’s educational system has generated an extraordinary record of achievement over the past two or three decades. In this paper, we report on key findings of a systems-level investigation into why Singapore has done so well, and explore the logic, strength, resilience and limits of the underlying pedagogical model and policy frameworks that have helped secure this success.

Specifically, we draw on large-scale representative data to analyze the classroom pedagogical practices of grades 5 and 9 mathematics and English in Singapore secondary schools. Known in Singapore as the Core Research Programme, the second iteration of Core research (Core 2, 2010-2014) aims for a comprehensive empirical and interpretive, quantitative and qualitative picture of the Singapore school system. Core 2 comprises 3 interlinked lines of research that focuses on teacher and student beliefs, attitudes, motivations, strategies and practices, actual classroom pedagogical practices, and classroom assessment literacies. Multiple design strategies and analytic methods are used including multilevel analyses of survey data from 2100 teachers and 16895 students, intensive classroom coding and analysis of 625 classroom lessons in grades 5 and 9 mathematics and English, artefactual analysis of 385 teacher tasks and 2897 student work.
In the course of our analysis, we develop three arguments. The first is the single-minded performative orientation of pedagogical practices generally in Singaporean classrooms that rarely deviated from a logic of curriculum coverage, knowledge transmission and assessment. Second, while we found substantial evidence of a pervasive performative pedagogical orientation, we also found that teachers in Singapore have a pragmatic, instrumental fit-for-purpose approach that includes a rarer knowledge-building orientation of pedagogical practices that focuses on conceptual understanding, self-regulation, disciplinary expertise, and the use of authentic knowledge-building tasks that focuses on what Michael Young (2008) calls powerful knowledge, and engages student learning in substantive ways. Third, we found that the national high stakes assessment system, by virtue of its considerable institutional authority, both shapes the pattern of pedagogical practice at the classroom level and constrained opportunities for pedagogical improvement.

We highlight the significance of the research by examining three key issues. First, how such large-scale research is used by policy makers, school leaders and practitioners to not only inform policy and improve practice, but opens up a sustained democratic dialogue between the key tensions between systemic educational reform and institutional constraints such as national high stakes testing. Second, how the tight nexus between research, policy and practice in Singapore’s context affords certain public and private discourses to be engaged in while limiting certain discourses that might counter the broad national narrative of Singapore’s educational success. Third, key challenges in educational improvement and teacher pedagogical responsibilities are surfaced through the Core 2 research that allow dialogic exchanges between stakeholders over the politics of national reform initiatives, , evidence-based educational policy, school-based innovations, educational research and pedagogical practices in the classroom. Implications are made for how a more nuanced form of public/private scholarship can be actively negotiated in the context of diverse societies where issues of democracy/ies are constantly contested.

Author

• Dennis Kwek, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University