Use of comics to enhance students’ learning for the development of the twenty-first century competencies in the mathematics classroom

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of comics in teaching mathematics in the secondary mathematics classroom. We explicate how the use of comics in teaching mathematics can prepare students for the twenty-first century competencies. We developed an alternative teaching package using comics for two lower secondary mathematics topics. This alternative teaching package consists of (1) several sets of comic strips expounding all related mathematical concepts in a lively way; (2) tiered practice questions for learning reinforcement; and (3) a set of proposed lesson outlines with suggestions on how to use the comics for mathematics teaching. We also report how one of the teachers in our study used this teaching package in her mathematics lessons. Her lessons were video-recorded and 11 students were interviewed to help us understand how the mathematics comics lessons were enacted and the students’ perception of comics as instruction. We identified instances in which the teacher tweaked the provided resource to further enhance student learning and incorporated elements of the twenty-first century competencies during her lessons. Through selected student interviews, we also identified instances in which students commented on their gain from the new approach from the perspective of the twenty-first century competencies.     

Seamless learning in the mobile age: a theoretical and methodological discussion on using cooperative inquiry to study digital kids on-the-move

This paper shares the theoretical and methodological frameworks that are deployed in a 3-year study to examine how Singapore primary school students leverage on mobile technology for seamless learning. This notion of seamless learning refers to the integrated and synergistic effects of learning in both formal and informal settings, which is distributed across different learning processes (emergent or planned) as well as across different spaces (in or out of class). Drawing insights from the literature and our study, we assert that we should jettison the technology-centric view to adopt a socio-cultural framework. This move puts us in a better position to make sense of the rich complexities coalescing around the students’ in-situ use of mobile devices. We also critiqued the adequacy of our people-centred data collection method, in particular, cooperative inquiry in capturing instances of seamless learning. Challenges of operationalising the cooperative inquiry approaches are also detailed in the paper.     

Optimizing between data transformation and parametric weighting for stable binary classification

In this paper, an optimization problem is formulated for stable binary classification. Essentially, the objective function seeks to optimize a full data transformation matrix along with the learning of a linear parametric model. The data transformation matrix and the weight parameter vector are alternatingly optimized based on the area above the receiver operating characteristic curve criterion. The proposed method improves the existing means via an optimal data transformation rather than that based on the diagonal, random and ad-hoc settings. This optimal transformation stretches beyond the fixed settings of known optimization methods. Extensive experiments using 34 binary classification data sets show that the proposed method can be more stable than competing classifiers. Specifically, the proposed method shows robustness to imbalanced and small training data sizes in terms of classification accuracy with statistical evidence.     

Towards a People-Centred Education: Possibilities and Struggles in the Philippines

Focusing on the Philippines, the article describes the role played by people's movements and non-governmental organizations in empowering citizens and combating injustice. Educational programmes are an important element in this struggle. The authors cite examples of what Paolo Freire called the "pedagogy of dialogue", which seeks to develop creative, critical enquiry and self-reliant understanding. Such programmes have made an impact in areas such as women's empowerment, poverty-alleviation and the combating of environmental destruction. The authors argue that this type of education can also play an important role in challenging the materialist vision of progress and awakening people to deeper values.     

Open-ended investigations: Performance and effects of pre-training

Students' performance and the effects of pre-training were studied for tasks rated high in ambiguity, in particular those where the solution to the tasks cannot be arrived at through predictable algorithms. A total of 277 thirteen-year-old students from two urban schools in Singapore were randomly assigned to two groups. One group was provided with instruction for dealing with such tasks in general before performing a series of tasks, while the other group performed the tasks without the instruction. How well the students coped with the ambiguities of the tasks with and without pretraining is reported in this paper.     

A Review of Studies in Science Education in Singapore: 1971 - 1990

Research should play a central role in decision making. Practitioners as well as policy makers can illafford to ignore the importance of research, particularly those involving the local context, in informing practice. Contextual differences are often incurred when overseas research findings are imported. A very strong case can therefore be made for more local research studies for use within the local context. There is, however, a dearth of local studies in science education over the past two decades. This paper attempts to briefly survey the field to account for the impoverished state. It will then review some thirty-six research studies carried out in Singapore spanning the period from 1971 to 1990—these representing the studies where documentation were available—with the view of pooling together the findings of the studies and eliciting trends for the benefit of future research efforts as well as enlightening practice and policy.     

Teaching, Teacher Knowledge and Constructivism

An effective education program delivers a satisfactory level of achievement for every student. For this to happen, we must examine carefully the implications of educational theories and research for teaching and learning. The way a teacher conducts his or her lessons must also be examined critically. This paper will deal with teaching, teacher knowledge and constructivism. For teaching, some reasons were suggested for the observation why it had not changed significantly since the last 40 years in Asian classrooms. In the area of teacher knowledge, the authors report a recent research finding on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development. The paper concludes with a discussion on whether constructivism is indeed a better way to teach. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.