Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP)

Learning Sciences and Innovation (LSI)

Developing Innovative Learning Designs and Alternative Assessments

LSI seeks to expand and enhance the niche area of learning sciences and ICT integration to explore, reflect on and advance the educational goals of preparing learners to be future-ready. LSI research will develop innovative learning designs, and alternative assessments through design-based research, and in the process, develop theories to guide practice. Factors that will be studied include learning processes and in-situ learning, social-cultural contexts, addressing the linkages between theory and practice through mediations by design. LSI will leverage on inter-disciplinary synergies for a more holistic science of learning perspectives.

LSI research will address the challenge of providing multiple pathways for students in schools and out of school that address their personalised needs and learner growth. It will harness the new opportunities for gathering multiple streams of data (with different modalities and granularity) to assess and facilitate learning trajectories. In doing more applied translation of learning sciences to classroom practices, LSI will continue to study deepening and sustaining learning interventions by doing extended-time design-based research, case studies, system-level analysis and meta-analyses.

Research Questions We Seek to Solve

How to Design:

Innovations that support deep learning via student-generated ideas and/or artefacts and student-centered learning cultures?

For new literacies such as new media literacies, design thinking and computational thinking in the schools?

For synergies with informal learning and learning across the lifespan?

For and impact on 21st Century competencies, values and dispositions for future learning, and to design new forms of assessments that are appropriate for future-ready learners?

Programmatic Lines of Inquiry

Harnessing formative assessment with learning analytics and visualisation to guide teachers' instructional practices, orchestration and noticing in learning in different learning spaces.
Implementing learning interventions at critical transitional stages throughout the schooling life span, leading towards life-long learning.
Implementing tasks and assessments that encourage multiple perspectives and experiences and implementing interest-based learning across formal and informal contexts, leading towards life-wide learning.
Preparing students to be designers, innovators, problem-solvers and entrepreneurs to support Singapore's Smart Nation Initiative.

Current Projects

Fostering science teachers' language awareness: Exploring impacts on teachers; oral interactions with students to support science writing

Enhancing mathematics curriculum through Team-Based Learning

Researching and developing pedagogies using unplugged and computational thinking approaches for teaching computing in the schools

Key Research Projects

Principal Investigator: Dr Teo Chew Lee, OER 19/19 TCL, 2019-2022

Uncovering the Process and Outcome of Computer-Supported-Collaborative-Learning (CSCL) using Multimodal Learning Analytics: New Environments and Assessment for CSCL in the learning continuum

E - Campus Runway Outdoor Fork Blue Skies Low Angle

Principal Investigator: Dr Wong Lung Hsiang, OER 07/20 WLH, 2021-2023

Singapore primary and secondary students' perceptions, challenges and attainment in Chinese and Tamil composition writing: A comparative study on computer-based and paper-and-pen-based writing

E - Outdoor Tall Trees Building Sunset Sky

Principal Investigator: Dr Kenneth Lim, OER 28/19 LYT, 2020-2023

Designing for greater authenticity in Geographical Investigations (GI) through local microclimate studies with the Internet of Things (IoT) and open-source environmental sensors

Malay Teacher in Red Tudung Teaching Group of 7 Primary School Students in Uniform (480x288px)

Principal Investigator: Dr Seah Lay Hoon, OER 16/16 SLH