Teacher preparation for a problem-solving curriculum in Singapore

Problem solving is at the heart of the Singapore Mathematics curriculum. However, it remains a challenge for teachers to realise this curricular goal in practice. Here, we review the efforts of Singapore mathematics teacher educators in incorporating problem-solving (teaching) competency in teacher education and PD programmes. We discuss conceptual and practical issues, actions taken and changes made in building teachers?? capacity to enact a problem-solving curriculum in a school-based design experiment project. In the project, teachers learnt problem solving, observed and then carried out lessons, using the ??Mathematics Practical????akin to the science practical??as key to instruction and assessment.     

Reviving Pólya's “Look Back” in a Singapore school

This study is based on the stance that Pólya's “Look Back,” though understudied, remains relevant to Mathematics curricula that place emphasis on problem solving. Although the Singapore Mathematics curriculum adopts the goal of teaching Look Back, research about how it is carried out in actual classroom practice is rare. In our project, we focus on a redesign of a teacher development programme that is targeted to help teachers realize Pólya's original vision of Look Back in the classroom. We report the cases of two teachers who have participated in the teacher development programme: their thinking about Look Back (through interview records) and their interpretation of Look Back in their classroom practice (through video records). By bringing these two spheres of data together, we discuss their degree of ‘buy-in’ to Look Back in the overall problem solving enterprise.     

An overview of the gender factor in mathematics in TIMSS-2003 for the Asia-Pacific region

This paper highlights the gender factor in the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study in 2003 (TIMSS-2003) of eight participating countries from the Asia-Pacific region: Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong-SAR, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines (Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong-SAR will be referred to as countries in this paper.) in mathematics. The focus is on gender-related data encompassing the overall performance of students from the participating countries and their performance in the content and cognitive domains. At grade 8 level, the gender difference in the overall performance of students mirrored the international average and favored girls in all countries of the Asia-Pacific region (except in Japan and the Republic of Korea). The regional data also showed that, in general, the Philippines and Singapore can be considered to be at one extreme with gender differences favoring girls in both content and cognitive domains, and the Republic of Korea and to some extent Japan are at the other extreme with the gender differences favoring boys. At grade 4 level, girls from the Philippines and Singapore also performed better than the boys whereas the boys from Japan and Chinese Taipei did slightly better than the girls.     

The preparation of primary mathematics teachers in Singapore: programs and outcomes from the TEDS-M study

This paper describes five aspects of primary mathematics teacher education in Singapore: (a) the teaching profession in Singapore, (b) the structure of pre-service teacher education programs offered by the National Institute of Education, (c) self-reports of Singapore future primary mathematics teachers about the opportunities to learn mathematics-related contents offered by these programs, based on the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) survey, (d) the performance of these future teachers in mathematics content knowledge and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge assessed by the TEDS-M study, and (e) the relationships of opportunities to learn with this performance. The paper concludes with some suggestions about how to improve the quality of initial teacher preparation in the areas of recruitment and training.