This edited book is a comprehensive resource for understanding the history as well as the current status of educational practices in Singapore. It is a one-stop reference guide to education and educational issues/concerns here. There are three sections: Part 1 provides a sectorial overview of how education has been organized in this country such as preschool, special needs, primary and secondary, and adult education divisions. In Part 2, contributors critically delve into issues and policies that are pertinent to understanding education here such as underachievement, leadership, language education, assessment, and meritocracy to question what Part 1 might have taken for granted. Part 3 contains the largest number of contributors because it offers a scholarly examination into specific subject histories. This section stands out because of the comparative rarity of its subject matter (history of Physical Education, Art, Music, Geography Education, etc.) in Singapore.

This book explores Singapore’s language education system. Unlike previous volumes, which discuss the bilingual requirement for learning, it focuses on Singapore’s quadrilingual system, bringing together articles on each of the four languages – English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil – as well as articles that examine more than one language. It highlights past successes, current concerns, and future directions for language education. The book focuses on classroom pedagogy in all four official languages, showcasing how languages are taught and learned in Singapore as a basis for better understanding the system “from the inside out.” The authors present empirical, classroom-based studies on language pedagogy in all four languages, as well as updated information on the current socio-political context and how it has influenced attempts at pedagogical innovation. Consideration is given to the dialectical relationship between policy and practice. The chapters also include discussions of pre-school-age learning, influences of language policy, home literacy practices, and commentaries by international language-in-education scholars. This approach also provides a basis for international comparison – especially for those who are interested in fostering English proficiency while maintaining one or more national languages. The volume is particularly important in light of the continuing international efforts to integrate English into national educational systems where it is not the dominant language.

This book gives a brief account of how social and economic changes have an impact on the Singapore education system, bearing in mind that education and national development are closely related. Besides providing a short history of education in Singapore, the book discusses how the New Education System(NES) was implemented, public response to streaming, and the impact of the NES on educational wastage and attainments.

This edited volume explores key areas of interests in Singapore math and science education including issues on teacher education, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, teaching practices, applied learning, ecology of learning, talent grooming, culture of science and math, vocational education and STEM. It presents to policymakers and educators a clear picture of the education scene in Singapore and insights into the role of math and science education in helping the country excel beyond international studies such as PISA, the pedagogical and curricula advancements in math and science learning, and the research and practices that give Singaporean students the competitive edge in facing the uncertain and challenging landscape of the future.

E explores, using textual (words) and visual (image) data from the corporate newsletters of two prominent Asian universities, how particular discourses and their associated discursive representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity occur in higher education. In particular, she looks at the expression of both institutional priorities and state imperatives that lend themselves to a complementarity built upon two contradictory perspectives: individualism and communitarianism. She argues that the ever-increasing demand for, and utility of higher education in neoliberal society means that it no longer functions merely to provide knowledge and skills, but has implications for society, the individual and the state with regard to their ways of thinking, doing and being. Contributing to a growing corpus of literature on how higher education around the world is being shaped by neoliberal policies, E’s research is based on work done in the city-state of Singapore, a less-well represented context in current literature. While both higher education institutions possess significantly different institutional identities and backgrounds, the alignment of their varied representations of neoliberal logic and subjectivity with state-sanctioned imperatives that indirectly impose demands and constraints shows how neoliberalism as ideology adapts to the socio-political, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions that make up the Singapore context. The discursive representations of context-dependent neoliberal logics and subjectivity are discussed in terms of their ideological implications, focusing primarily on the complementarity between seemingly contradictory ideological positions. E’s work uses an innovative framework that integrates aspects of Discourse Theory with Critical Discourse Analysis and demonstrates the use of this framework through empirical linguistic and image analysis. Appealing to academics and graduate students in linguistics, especially those with an interest in critical multimodal discourse analysis, audiences from the domains of higher education research, critical geography, sociology and political science will also find this a useful book.

This book addresses the topic of humanities education fieldwork using the Singapore context as its primary focus. It explores how the thought processes behind and techniques of various humanities and social sciences subjects can be applied to fieldwork in a variety of school and training settings. In addition, it discusses how humanities students and educators could stand to benefit from utilizing fieldwork techniques and skills used in archaeology and anthropology, beyond undergraduates majoring in that discipline. Finally, the adoption of multidisciplinary approaches in fieldwork incorporating history, geography, literature and social studies demonstrate how these subjects can collaborate together in actual case studies to facilitate participants’ learning in the field.

This book seeks to present a comprehensive review of Singapore's ICT Masterplans in education, providing a rare behind-the-scenes look at policy planning, as well as the lessons learnt and insights gained from the past decade of the use of ICT in teaching and learning. Since 1997 (when the First Masterplan was launched) to 2008, schools and teachers have made great strides in their use of ICT for education at all levels: primary, secondary and junior college. The seeds of this change were planted in the Pioneer Years (1980-1996) which marked the pre-Masterplan period, and they began to germinate in the momentous Foundation Years (1997-2002) when the First Masterplan got underway. The subsequent period of the Engaging Years (2003-2008) outlines the growth of the Second Masterplan, while the Future Years present the vision of what the future of ICT will look like in Singapore schools in 2009 and beyond.This comprehensive coverage of the evolution of ICT use in Singapore schools includes views and reflections from key individuals involved in the planning and implementation of the two ICT Masterplans, students, teachers, ICT experts, and policy makers. It also includes articles detailing significant projects and programmes of the First and Second ICT Masterplans.

This book provides a one-stop resource for mathematics educators, policy makers and all who are interested in learning more about the why, what and how of mathematics education in Singapore. The content is organized according to three significant and closely interrelated components: the Singapore mathematics curriculum, mathematics teacher education and professional development, and learners in Singapore mathematics classrooms. Written by leading researchers with an intimate understanding of Singapore mathematics education, this up-to-date book reports the latest trends in Singapore mathematics classrooms, including mathematical modelling and problem solving in the real-world context.

This book presents a holistic view of child development that emphasises on being mindful of the child as well as his/her environment. It presents a history of the development of the early childhood education sector in Singapore. This book consolidates the more recent research work that has been done in early childhood education, specifically by researchers from the National Institute of Education, Singapore. It discusses topics focusing on child development and education, teacher training and wellbeing, and the development of culturally appropriate assessment. The content of this book center around the child, with a consideration of influences in the environment that can impact child development.

Not much has been written about the private education sector in Singapore despite the fact that the sector houses about 300 private education institutions (PEIs) and enrolls about 150,000 students. Private Education in Singapore: Contemporary Issues and Challenges is an exciting book that aims to fill a gap in the literature. In the book, the author offers an extensive discussion on (i) the key elements of the sector — types and features of the PEIs, (ii) the regulatory framework for private education, (iii) students' aspiration and the impact of the ASPIRE report on PEIs, and (iv) the provision of external degree programme through transnational partnership. The book also tackles the hotly debated discussion in relation to academic quality and standard of PEI courses. The author identifies the reasons — some of them have more characteristics of a myth — and suggests a number of ways to overcome the issues and challenges.