Associate Professor Chua Bee Leng,
President, World Educational Research Association
President, Educational Research Association of Singapore
Professor Christine Goh,
Director, National Institute of Education
Distinguished speakers, guests,
Ladies and gentlemen
1. A very good morning to all of you, and a warm welcome to all our delegates, in particular those who have flown in from over 20 countries. Welcome to Singapore. I want to thank Professor Chua for the opportunity to join all of you at today's conference.
2. Singapore is a small city-state. Our only resource is our people. Hence since our independence, there has been a concerted effort and a commitment to develop every Singaporean to their full potential.
3. The world continues to change rapidly. We are witnessing and anticipating productivity leaps in work and learning with the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Rapid advancements in material science, energy, medical technology, just to cite a few, have big impact on our lives. Geopolitics is shifting too. The world is now far more interconnected than before, but it is also at risk of becoming more polarised. As educators, we must ensure that our students can learn for life to embrace future challenges and ensure that new opportunities are available.
4. All education systems must therefore move beyond preparing them for a static certificate to priming them to flourish in the future. In Singapore, we strive to achieve this goal by future-readying our curriculum, by harnessing technology and empowering our teachers, and by investing in educational research that draws on multiple disciplines.
Future-Ready Curriculum that Equips Students with Values and Competencies
5. Singapore schools have shifted from primarily transmitting knowledge, to inculcating values and building competencies that will set our students up for success in the future.
6. Launched initially in 2010, the Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes, or 21CC Framework in short, has guided the design of the Singapore national curriculum and school programmes. This framework undergirds the holistic education that our schools provide to our students so that they can thrive in the future. We focus on values such as resilience and respect, and competencies such as self-awareness, responsible decision-making, and critical thinking.
7. We have recently enhanced this framework to better prepare our students for a more uncertain and even more complex world. We will be putting greater emphasis on the following competencies to develop them more strongly in our students. First, adaptive and inventive thinking. In a fast-changing world, our students will need to be able to respond nimbly to change and act in a timely fashion, to proactively spot and seize opportunities to innovate and add value to optimise our human edge over machines and Artificial Intelligence.
8. Second, communication skills. This goes beyond oracy skills. We want students to have the confidence to share ideas proactively and engage with others persuasively, by speaking up and leveraging multiple mediums and modes appropriately. They should communicate with empathy, listen to as well as reconcile those diverse views to work towards common goals.
9. Finally, civic literacy. Our students should be able to appreciate Singapore's unique context, recognise that we all have a meaningful stake in our shared future and have the desire and will to contribute to the community, the nation and the world.
10. Competencies, dispositions and values must be learned through contexts and domains of learning. Therefore, students learn and reinforce their learning over the years through subject disciplines, school programmes and student development experiences.
Harnessing Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning
11. We continue to harness the transformative potential of technology in teaching and learning. We recently launched the "Transforming Education through Technology" Masterplan 2030. Our students will learn about technology but will also use technology to learn. The teachers shift their role from focusing on direct teaching and transmitting declarative knowledge, to designing the environment, resources and tasks for students to learn optimally.
Investing in Strategic Research to Drive Education Outcomes
12. How we develop and implement future-ready curriculum, as well as how teachers harness technology and other effective approaches, are the results of critical self-reflection, learning from others and continuous innovation. Singapore is one of the countries at the leading edge of general education. It is therefore important for us to conduct empirical research and synthesise existing research findings.
13. For the past twenty years, we have set aside a dedicated pot of money, which is called the Education Research Funding Programme, to fund research projects on learning and teaching. This amounts to about $70 million for the current 5-year tranche. Many visiting researchers have told us that this is generous given our small size. Please collaborate with our Singapore researchers and make use of it.
14. Researchers based in Singapore can compete for this funding to initiate projects which are aligned to broad strategic education research areas that are important to MOE. Four foundational research areas which MOE prioritises are:
- One, instructional core which covers the interactions between curriculum, teachers and students, and teaching and learning of the subject disciplines;
- Two, teacher learning and development, which covers teacher professional development, and teacher knowledge and well-being;
- Three, school environment, organisation and leadership, which is key to school improvement and effectiveness; and
- Lastly, societal contexts shaping education, which covers factors beyond schools such as socio-economic and cultural factors, which all educators must take into consideration to improve student learning.
15. The most impactful research often covers more than one area, for example, research into bilingualism.
16. Besides these evergreen areas, we also give targeted support to researchers who investigate critical problems of policy and practice. These problems relate to the future of learning, teaching and schooling. We welcome researchers to tap on newer research disciplines and areas, such as neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The research questions for these projects are often co-constructed with researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders.
17. A smaller proportion of this research fund also support fit-for-purpose projects that will generate research findings for MOE to use immediately to improve our work. We also hope to uncover 'unknown unknowns' through funding 'blue-sky' projects.
18. While most funded projects are highly exploratory, our investment has served Singapore and the education system well. A number of these projects have influenced Singapore education policies, programmes and practice. For example, findings from the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP) have informed our decision to increase investment in MOE kindergartens and to give stronger focus on strengthening the quality of interaction in preschool classrooms.
19. CORE which is NIE Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP)'s flagship research programme, has surfaced many important findings about what and how teachers teach in Singapore classrooms, and our progress over the last 20 years. Recent findings about how our Mother Tongue Language (MTL) teachers use English language in classrooms have sparked careful deliberations on how trans-languaging technique may be used to support MTL learning.
20. Peer power is another important study that has collected social network data from students in different classrooms in selected secondary schools. One interesting finding suggests that friendship between a pair of students can raise the school engagement of the less motivated student, yet have no significant downsides on the more motivated student. This project can help us finetune our Full Subject Based Banding policy, which is a key shift in the way we organise students with diverse characteristics into every classroom.
21. Many of you may also have heard about productive failure, which is developed by Manu Kapur and funded in Singapore. Besides providing teachers with a novel learning design which can improve our students' conceptual understanding, compared to early direct instruction, productive failure is powerful because it challenges many Singapore teachers' assumption of what their students can or cannot do. It shows us quite convincingly that all students, regardless of their academic performance, can benefit from similar curricular and instructional innovation.
22. The impact of these funded projects has given us the confidence and the conviction to support ambitious projects with greater local and global impact. We have just approved the first phase of a longitudinal cohort study, which costs a few million Singapore dollars and is titled DREAMS (Drivers, Enablers and pathways of Adolescent development in Singapore). We will be tracking 7,000 Secondary 1 students to Secondary 4, and we plan to follow the cohort into adulthood. We hope its findings will enrich our understanding of how adolescents learn, grow and live, and how their social-emotional development, aspiration and identity influence their long-term life outcomes.
Strong Research-Policy-Practice Nexus and Respect for Evidence
23. Funding may be necessary for cutting-edge research and high-quality findings, but it is not sufficient to result in research impact. We are able to nimbly apply research findings to improve policy and practice because of three reasons.
24. First, the strong partnership between MOE and National Institute of Education, and the wider education research community. The trust between Singapore researchers, policy makers and practitioners, cemented through deep personal relationship, go a long way in ensuring that research questions are relevant, research in schools are conducted efficiently with high fidelity, and research findings are taken seriously.
25. Second, within MOE, we have identified and developed a cadre of 300 senior specialists with deep expertise in diverse areas such as the curriculum, applied psychology and research and measurement. Coupled with intimate knowledge of the contexts shaping Singapore education system, they broker strategic research and help MOE extract value from research findings and apply them to improve our education system. This significantly shortens the time taken for research to yield impact.
26. Last but not least, our curiosity and respect for objective knowledge, evidence and data, and our insistence to be informed, but not paralysed, by them in decision making.
Conclusion
27. Nurturing future-ready students and teachers is an effort that will always be a work in progress for us. As we gather here today, we bring with us new knowledge, deep insight and unique experiences from all of you which can form the bedrock for education advancement in the face of challenges. Together, I hope that we can influence generations to come in all our countries, to mould future leaders, innovators, and change-makers. I look forward to the keynote lectures and I wish all participants a fruitful conference ahead.
28. Thank you very much.