Professional learning communities in Singapore and Shanghai: implications for teacher collaboration

Professional learning communities (PLCs) have been recognised as having the potential to raise the quality of teachers, teaching and student learning through structured teacher collaboration, and have been featured prominently in Singapore and Shanghai – both considered top-performing Asian societies in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Although embedded in education systems that are considered centralised, there are still significant differences. Drawing out key implications from the experiences of Singapore and Shanghai, this paper highlights the potential challenges in implementing PLCs. These challenges include heavy teacher workload, ambiguities in the understanding and implementation of PLCs, and hierarchical work structures. The discussions emanating from the comparison between Singapore and Shanghai PLCs seek to contribute towards the international literature on fostering teacher collaboration through PLCs, which has been predominantly Western-centric.     

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single‐feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18‐month‐old bilingual and monolingual infants (n = 90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English‐ and Mandarin‐learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.     

Religious Upbringing: a Rejoinder and Responses

In this symposium Michael Hand presents a rejoinder to criticisms of his ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36.4) by Jim Mackenzie, Peter Gardner and Charlene Tan. Defending the idea of the logical possibility of non‐indoctrinatory religious upbringing, he attempts to show that none of their various objections is successful. Mackenzie, Gardner and Tan each offer a response.     

Michael Hand,Indoctrination and the Inculcation of Belief

In ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ Michael Hand revisits the debate on the right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing in a liberal context. According to him, the logical difficulty lies in the fact that parents cannot both impart religious beliefs and avoid indoctrination. While Peter Gardner and Jim Mackenzie have responded to Hand's paper and raised a number of pertinent issues, what is missing is a fuller treatment of indoctrination and belief inculcation for children. In this paper, I argue that Hand's fallacy lies in his flawed understanding of indoctrination and belief inculcation: the inculcation of non‐rational beliefs, far from being indoctrinatory, is in fact necessary for children in the process of growing up.     

Private Supplementary Tutoring and Parentocracy in Singapore

Drawing on Brown (in Br J Sociol Educ 11(1):65–86, 1990) and Barrett DeWiele and Edgerton (in Interchange 47:189–210, 2016), this article explores the relationship between private supplementary tutoring and parentocracy using Singapore as an illustrative case study. It is argued that the ubiquity and affordability of private supplementary tutoring in Singapore indicate that parentocracy is embraced by the majority of parents who seek to give their children a competitive edge. Among the parents, better-educated parents with higher incomes adopt a more proactive interventionist parenting style by paying more for both academic and non-academic enrichment classes. The phenomenon of parentocracy has contributed to educational inequalities in Singapore as children from more privileged home backgrounds have access to more educational resources and opportunities. But the inequalities engendered by parentocracy are mitigated by high-stakes exams that ensure that admission to elite schools is still largely determined by exam results rather than the wealth and wishes of parents. This study offers a nuanced account of private supplementary tutoring through highlighting its diversity and appropriation by different parents in Singapore. The study also illustrates the co-existence of parentocracy and meritocracy where private supplementary tutoring is strategically utilised by parents in Singapore to give their children an equal opportunity to excel in terminal exams.     

Signature Pedagogies for Educators Using Films: An Example From Singapore

This article discusses the application of Shulman's “signature pedagogies” through the utilization of films for preservice teachers and school leaders in Singapore. Using the films Dead Poets Society and Ahead of the Class, this article explains how these films facilitated the participants' engagement with the surface, deep, and implicit structures of education. In the process, they applied critical thinking by arriving at criteria-based and context-appropriate judgments reflectively. The research findings reveal two broad themes. First, the educators were cognizant of the key issues, opportunities, constraints, and obstacles in teaching and school leadership. Second, they appreciated the importance of adopting situated teaching and leadership approaches to cater to the needs of various educational stakeholders. This study highlights critical thinking as a sociocultural practice where the educators (re)interpreted the films through their cultural lenses and drew on local resources and logics to deal with the challenges in teaching and the school contexts.     

An analysis of ill-formed input in natural language queries to document retrieval systems

We analyzed natural language document retrieval queries from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina in order to investigate the frequency of various types of ill-formed input, such as spelling errors, co-occurrence violations, conjunctions, ellipsis and missing or incorrect punctuation. The primary reason for analyzing ill-formed inputs was to determine whether there is a significant need to study ill-formed inputs in detail. After analyzing the queries, we found that most of the queries were sentence fragments and that many of them contained some type of ill-formed input. Conjunctions caused the most problems. The next most serious problem was caused by punctuation errors. Spelling errors occurred in a small number of the queries. The remaining types of ill-formed input considered, ellipsis and co-occurrence violations, were not found in the queries.     

Education reforms in Cambodia: issues and concerns

This paper discusses the key issues and concerns in the Cambodian government’s efforts to implement three priority education policies for 2006–2010: ensure equitable access to education; increase quality and efficiency of the education services; and promote institutional development and capacity building for decentralisation. This paper identifies the prevailing problems of low enrolment, high dropout rates and high repetition rates of students in public schools. The paper further explores some concerns which may hinder the government from achieving the desired outcomes in the priority policies: the high opportunity cost of schooling; the heavy education costs due to teachers charging informal fees from students; and the localised socio-cultural setting where transparency, accountability and meritocracy are difficult to achieve.     

Dynamics of change: decentralised centralism of education in Singapore

Many countries are introducing major educational changes to prepare their students to meet the challenges in a knowledge economy and enhance the country’s competitive edge. This paper discusses recent educational changes in Singapore using the framework of decentralised centralism proposed by Karlsen (2000). The paper explores the dynamics of change in the initiation, content, levels and simultaneity of the decentralisation process in Singapore since 1997. The paper further analyses the ideological roots of the decentralisation policy through a discussion of the tension between the functionalist and liberal forms of education in the Singapore context. The discussion adds to existing literature on the tensions and challenges faced by countries in their attempts to introduce educational changes in their countries.     

Promoting female achievement in the sciences: Research & implications

It is anticipated that by the year 2000 Canadian women will make up approximately 50% of the Canadian labour force. Despite this seemingly positive trend toward equitable gender-based participation in the labour force, females are extremely under represented in the scientific and technological fields (Statistics Canada, 1993). Females who are excluded or exclude themselves from the study of mathematics and science, limit career options and advancement opportunities in areas that drive and dominate social and economic trends. The underutilization of females in careers dependent upon science and mathematics expertise extends beyond the issue of individual actualization of potential, and has important consequences for society; significantly, as a threat to the economic prosperity of the nation. The key questions associated with this problem are: What are the factors which delimit and enhance female participation and achievement in the sciences? What can counsellors, educators and parents do to change this trend? Previous research has explored several dimensions, however, the greatest emphasis has been given to the particular barriers girls and women face. Relatively limited work has been given to factors associated with female success in the sciences. This paper reviews our current understanding of the problem, and describes a current research study that attempts to address some of the problems associated with previous theory and research in this area.