Visible Learning and the Enacted Curriculum in Singapore
In this chapter we assess the intellectual quality of the enacted curriculum in Secondary 3 Mathematics and English in a large representative sample of schools in Singapore using criteria and standards identified in part by John Hattie in Visible Learning
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Visible Learning and the Enacted Curriculum in Singapore David Hogan, Dennis Kwek, Phillip Towndrow, Ridzuan Abdul Rahim, Teck Kiang Tan, Han Jing Yang, and Melvin Chan
Introduction In August 2004, the Singaporean Prime Minister announced the launch of the Teach Less Learn More (TLLM) initiative to improve the quality of teaching and learning in Singapore. The following year the Minister of Education in his annual address to school staff outlined the details of the plan, including its key implementation strategies (Shanmugaratnam 2005). Since then, the Ministry has progressively implemented the TLLM initiative across Singapore’s school system, emphasizing, in particular the importance of a focus on the “quality” rather than the “quantity” of instruction, a greater focus on “quality of interaction” between teachers and students, advocating less “telling” and more “talking” and less drill and practice and more inquiry based learning strategies, and a greater emphasis on formative assessment and differentiated instruction (see Chap. 7). In a series of papers and reports drawing on survey data from students and teachers, the first author has reported on the impact of TLLM on classroom practice in Singaporean schools some 6 years after the launch of the TLLM initiative (Hogan 2011, 2012; Hogan et al. 2011). In brief, he found that the impact of TLLM on instructional practice was very limited despite evidence here and there of some imaginative pedagogical innovation. He also judged that this occurred for a variety of reasons, including neglect of the tight coupling of the national assessment system and classroom instruction, a pervasive folk culture of teaching and learning across the system that impeded sustainable and effective instructional innovation, an implementation strategy unable to support substantial and sustainable pedagogical improvement, and the weak professional authority of teachers. But rather than dwell on these matters again here, what we want to focus on in this
D. Hogan • D. Kwek (*) • P. Towndrow • R.A. Rahim • T.K. Tan • H.J. Yang • M. Chan National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] Z. Deng et al. (eds.), Globalization and the Singapore Curriculum: From Policy to Classroom, Education Innovation Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4451-57-4_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2013
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analysis is a quite different question: not did TLLM make a difference, but is current instructional practice in Singapore consistent with our most considered and evidence-based judgments about effective and productive pedagogy. In short, we want to ask how well current instructional practices stand up against contemporary understandings of good pedagogy. In answering this question we plan to draw upon a conception of good pedagogy developed by Professor John Hattie – a standard he terms as “visible learning.” Hattie has been publishing meta-analytic studies of the relationship between instruction and learning since 1987 (Hat
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