Emerging Principalship Collaborative Style: Towards Research in Mentoring

An earlier exploratory study (Chong, 1991) suggest that a collaborative style of principalship is expected to emerge from the mentoring process. This paper highlights aspects of the environment of school management in Singapore which are beginning to support this emerging style that future principals are learning to adopt. It also identifies some possible areas for further research. Implications for policy and management are discussed. Mentoring episodes in Singapore could provide a unique opportunity for research that explicate a theory of morphogenesis.     

Information Economy and Changing Occupational Structure in Singapore

Using population census data since 1921, this article traces changes in employment and occupational structure in Singapore in the past 80 years. This is a follow-up to an earlier paper by Kuo and Chen (1987) that reported the nascent formation of the information society in Singapore till the 1980s. It also makes an assessment of the role of proactive government policies in directing industrial restructuring and occupational changes in this city-state. It is found that the long-term growing trend in information-related occupations has been in tandem and supportive of industrial changes in Singapore. One more wave of growth of information producers (and certainly, innovators) and information distributors is expected in the next couple of decades. The momentum has started, and competition from regional countries similarly aspiring to be information and knowledge economies will quicken the pace. The government has initiated fundamental changes in the educational system to meet the challenges of the knowledge-based economy. The small city-state has also long adopted an adaptive philosophy to be responsive to the ever-changing environment, either in technology or in regional politics. Based on the trend analysis, it is expected that the emergent information society will graduate into full status when Singapore attains a developed country status in the forthcoming decades.     

“Spaces Invested with Content”: Crossing the ‘Gaps’ in Comics with Readers in Schools

In recent years, reading scholars have increasingly attended to children’s responses to picturebook page breaks, reasoning that the inferences young readers make during the turning of the page are central to understanding how children construct continuous narratives in semiotically rich texts. In this paper I argue that comics (including comic books and graphic novels) offer similar gap-filling affordances as picturebooks, but for older children and adolescent readers. A major site of meaning-making in comics is the “gutter” between panels. This is where much of the magic occurs for readers while transacting with the medium. Since the comics medium is popular with many students and has received increased attention from teachers, researchers, and curriculum developers during the multimodal and multiliterate turns of the past decades, I argue that it is vital for educators not only to use comics in their classrooms, but to focus explicitly on gutters in order to exercise the medium’s full potential. Pulling from numerous sources, I provide several pedagogical activities that emphasize gutters as rich sites of constructing meaning.     

Population differences in constructive memory

An experiment was conducted to evaluate constructive memory in fourth-grade low-SES black and middle-SES white children. The children were read nine short passages; each passage was composed of two premise statements and a filler sentence. The children were tested by a recognition procedure. Thirty-six test sentences were presented randomly. Four sentences were associated with each passage (true premise, false premise, true inference, and false inference). Subjects were asked to make yes/no recognition decisions based on whether the test sentence was identical to a sentence presented at study. Middle-SES white children made few errors, except to true inference test sentences. This pattern of performance is consistent with the constructive view of memory. Low-SES black children also had a high error rate to true inference items. However, this outcome may not reflect constructive memory because they also had a high error rate to some of the other types of test sentences.     

Why I want to teach and how I feel about teaching—formation of teacher identity from pre-service to the beginning teacher phase

The aim of this study is to investigate the formation of student teachers’ teacher identity from pre-service to the end of the initial year in teaching. We explored why student teachers in Singapore have chosen to enter teaching and tracked changes in their attitudes and beliefs towards teaching at three time points: entry and exit of the initial teacher preparation programme and after 1 year of teaching. The findings showed that, in agreement with previous research, those who are attracted to the teaching profession were mainly motivated by altruistic or intrinsic factors. They also entered the initial training programme with a positive perception of the profession. However, at the point of exit, perceptions towards teaching showed a significant dip. After the first year of teaching, attitudes remained the same as they were at the point of exit. These factors influence the emerging sense of teaching identity.