The East Asian Modernization Model: Whither Education? Whither Education Research?

1. The East Asian Modernization Model: Whither Education? Whither Education Research? Professor David Hogan Dean, Office of Education Research National Institute of Education Singapore

2. 1. Metaphysical Certainties: The East Asian Modernization Model

3. 1.1. Metaphysical Certainties: The Asian Education Modernization Model The Singapore East Asian Education Modernization Model maps out a broad strategy of nation building based on the following sets of claims: • Economic thesis • Meritocratic thesis • Pedagogical Thesis • Cultural thesis • Organizational thesis • Nationhood thesis Each of these theses under pressure, and have been so for some time, producing no little anxiety and, in time, a range of remedies…

4. East Asian Modernization Model -1 1. Economic growth dependent on high levels of educational attainment Economic growth, social mobility and political legitimacy dependent on high skills/high value / high wages economic algorithm High skills / high value dependent on human capital formation (Becker: “the age of human capital”) Human capital formation dependent on rapid increase in educational participation and achievement Primary education in the 1960s: labor force for initial industrialization Secondary education by mid 1980s: labor force for high value manufacturing

5. East Asian Modernization Model-2 2. High levels of student performance/attainment are dependent on 2.1. Reliance on traditional (and direct) instruction rather than “child centered” or “constructivist” instruction… • repetition and memorization lead to understanding • Well organized, teacher dominated, clear, focused lessons 2.2. A traditional [Confucian] classroom moral economy based on • Hard work and effort attributions of academic success, rather than ability attributions • High levels of extrinsic motivation, engagement and student compliance • Favorable “pedagogical exchange”: effort and compliance in exchange for grades, promotion, credentials, good jobs, good income and social mobility

6. East Asian Modernization Model -3 2. High levels of student performance/attainment are dependent on… 2.3. A differentiated system of student grouping based on academic performance in high stakes summative assessments and streaming in primary and secondary schools • Permits differentiated instruction and maximizes pedagogical efficiency • Reduces drop out / non-participation rates. Increases institutional efficiency by reducing “wastage” • Permits selection of meritocratic elite critical to larger nation building project

7. East Asian Modernization Model -4 • 2.4. A high statist “command and control” system of instructional governance based on • Tight institutional, normative and cognitive control of pedagogical discourse • High stakes summative assessment system to • Drive pedagogy and ensure quality, accountability and responsiveness • Allocate students into streams and the broader social division of labor • Coherent, focused curriculum frameworks • Tight alignment curriculum, teaching and assessment • Content-rich textbooks • Tightly controlled system of teacher education and professional development with a focus on CK and PCK

8. 2. Metaphysical Anxieties: The Exhaustion of the Asian Modernization Model, 1995--

9. 1. Changing Human Capital Requirements: KBE & the Organization of Work Recent reports on contemporary workplaces in Knowledge Based Economies (KBEs) generally find that they are characterized by a new technical and social organization of work and by demands for new kinds of cognitive, communication and social skills

10. Technical organization of work A new technical organization of work, characterized by… Significantly greater cognitive complexity Expanded information processing and knowledge requirements Cross-functional, transdisciplinary, interactive tasks environments and project work High levels of tacit and uncodified knowledge Generating a demand for new kinds of cognitive and communication skills Analytical problem solving Knowledge application Generation of new knowledge Understanding complex multi-level functional relationships and system

11. Social organization of work A new social organization of work characterized by Greater autonomy Flatter hierarchies More team work More intensive interaction Shared decision making More risk taking More extensive oral and written communication Generating demand for new kinds of social understandingandskills A sense of agency Interpersonal problem solving Independence Collaboration Trust Adaptability

12. 2. Achievement Anxieties • While Singapore does well on TIMSS, concerns about EA PISA results • Narrower E-W gap than TIMSS • Western students do better on more open ended tasks • Singapore partaking in PISA in 2009: How well will it do? • TIMSS assessments don’t measure 21st century skills or the kinds of skills and dispositions needed for successful management of work in KBE worksites • Very narrow measurement band: Almost no measurement of broader institutional and existential capacities that are important for successful management of 21st century institutional environments, eg meta-cognition, deep processing of information, multi-literacies etc • Ignores findings from “revisionist” human capital theory research, especially importance of non-cognitive skills and attributes to productivity growth and life time income streams

13. 3. Instruction & Cognition Anxieties • Anxiety that Singapore schools too focused on development of 20th C skills and knowledge rather than 21st century knowledge and skills… • Anxiety that the intellectual quality of knowledge work in Singaporean classrooms are suboptimal with respect to development of 21st century skills? • Anxiety that too much surface processing of information rather than deep processing • Anxiety about the limited integration of technology into classroom pedagogy reflecting teacher judgments that new technologies are broadly inefficient with respect to the achievement of conventional assessment driven classroom objectives

14. 4. Innovation Anxieties • Anxiety that the close alignment of instructional practices with high stakes assessments has constrained the opportunity for pedagogical innovation • Anxiety that teachers lack the necessary capacities for high quality teaching • Anxiety that the dominant instructional pattern in Singapore (as elsewhere) are highly intractable and resistant to change

15. 5. Culture Trouble: Decline of East Asian moral economy? • Motivation Crisis • ability/deficit discourses of student achievement rather than traditional “East Asian” discourse of hard work / effort • Declining levels of student compliance and engagement • Anxiety that Singapore system encourages a heavy reliance on extrinsic motivation and instrumental outcomes and that this leaves students renders the dominant pedagogical exchange vulnerable to a decline in its exogenous terms of trade (declining rates of return to educational investments, declining social mobility rates)

16. Culture Trouble/Moral Panic – cont’d • Values Crisis • Anxiety about the creeping infiltration of Western, modernist and postmodern values and identity projects into the classroom, displacing traditional Confucian/East Asian values and identity projects. • In short, pervasive moral anxiety that modernization and globalization resulting in the “Westernization” of classroom, that Western values invading and colonizing Confucian sanctuary or “museums of virtue”. Yet Singapore strongly committed, since the early 1990s, to becoming a global city

17. Culture Trouble/Moral Panic – cont’d • Crisis of Meaning • Anxiety about the limited focus on meaning-making in Singaporean classrooms in favor of content coverage and exam preparation. • Anxiety that classrooms all too often constructed as manufactories of drill and practice and/or competitive marketplaces rather than communities of learners engaged in distributed forms of knowledge building • Values Crisis • Anxiety about the creeping infiltration of Western, modernist and postmodern values and identity projects into the classroom, displacing traditional Confucian/East Asian values and identity projects. • In short, pervasive moral anxiety that modernization and globalization resulting in the “Westernization” of classroom, that Western values invading and colonizing Confucian sanctuary or “museums of virtue”. Yet Singapore strongly committed, since the early 1990s, to becoming a global city

18. 6. Organizational Anxieties • Streaming system • Too inflexible and rigid: prevents lateral mobility as students learn and develop • Over-regulates ambition, diminishes student motivation and engagement and weakens the pedagogical exchange: “cooling out” effect • Danger of stratified allocation of pedagogical resources/capitals within and between schools, unless carefully monitored • Dependent on highly questionable assumptions about “merit” and validity of high stakes assessments, especially at an early age • Top-down “command and control” system of instructional governance • Constrains pedagogical innovation and cultural change • Inhibits effective implementation • Weakens professionalism and development of a vigorous and robust pedagogical discourse

19. 7. Nationhood: A state but not a nation? • Fundamental ontological anxiety that Singapore born a state but not a nation. • Achievement of a sense of nationhood profoundly fragile and precarious • Very young society • Complex multi-racial society • Government support for maintaining traditional racial identities and traditions • Reliance on two discourses to create a national narrative • Singapore success story • Danger • Anxiety about the tension between Singapore’s global city project and its national identity/nationhood project: How can these be reconciled? • Tension between materialism and individualism, on the one hand, and sense of national belonging and attachment, on the other.

20. 8. Social Inequality Anxieties • Substantial and growing inequalities of educational achievement, in TIMSS and in national high stakes assessments, principally along social class lines, secondarily along racial lines • Critical importance of “compositional effects” at classroom and school level: what family you come from matters, but who you go to class or school with matters even more • Increasing fear of institutionalized forms of social reproduction of inequality… • education mediates social stratification • but social stratification increasingly mediates achievement? • specter of a tight coupling of race and class with strong racial component.

21. 3. Metaphysical Remedies: The Remaking of the Asian Modernization Model, 1997--

22. 3.1. Policy Settings 3.2. Education Research

23. 3.1. Policy Settings • Thing Schools Learning Nation (TSLN) (1997) • Innovation & Enterprise (I&E) • ITC Master Plan (ITC-MP) • National Education (NE) • Teach Less and Learn More (TLLM) (2005) • [Leveling Up] (2007) • CRPP (2003)

24. Thinking Schools, Learning Nation, 1997 “We will bring about a mindset change among Singaporeans. We must get away from the idea that it is only the people at the top who should be thinking, and the job of everyone else is to do as told. Instead we want to bring about a spirit of innovation, of learning by doing, of everyone each at his own level all the time asking how he can do his job better...” (Italics added). Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong, Speech at the Opening of the 7th International Conference on Thinking in 1997, para. 31.

25. Teach Less, Learn More, 2005 Instructional Practices • Focus on “quality,” not “quantity,” of instruction • Greater focus on “quality of interaction” between teachers and students • Less “telling” and more “talking” • Less drill and practice, more inquiry based learning strategies • More formative assessment and differentiated instruction, not one size fits all • Better integration of technology and pedagogy • Less “academic”/more practical/”hands on” curriculum for low achieving students • Stronger curricula focus on national education and moral development: key desired outcomes of schooling Moral Economy/ Classroom Culture • Try to promote intrinsic interest in learning: “Passion for learning” (“Ignite”) • Recognize a multiplicity of “talents” rather than a singularity of “merit” • Weaken ability attributions at the classroom level

26. Teach Less, Learn More: Towards a New EAMM Organizational Changes • Flexible pathways: substantial weakening of the streaming system without formally abolishing it. Instructional Governance and Implementation Strategy • Devolution of pedagogical authority to schools – partial decoupling of schools and centre (but to individual teachers rather than collectively?) • “Top down support for bottom up initiatives” • School based curriculum development --“White space” (no school based assessment … yet!) • increase innovation at the school and classroom level by supporting action research / classroom inquiry. Research activists in every school by 2010. • Establishment of CRPP in 2003 to support evidence based policy and practice with a grant of SGD $49m (HKD $200m)

27. 3.2. Supporting Research on Classroom Pedagogy: CRPP 2003-2008

28. CRPP CRPP established in 2003 with five key objectives: to describe & measure patterns of classroom pedagogy in Singaporean schools to measure the impact of pedagogical practices on student outcomes controlling for student characteristics to design technologically enriched learning environments & support their integration into classroom pedagogy to identify opportunities for the improvement of pedagogical practice through a carefully designed & evidence-basedintervention strategy to support evidence-based policy formulation and instructional practice to meet the challenges of 21st century institutional environments

29. Core Panel Design

31. Organization of CRPP Research Program Core Research Program (2004-07) 6 Panels EB Intervention Program (2006-08) 20 projects Specific Focus Projects (2004-06) 90+ Projects

32. INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT ORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLING PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES MORAL ECONOMY OF THE CLASSROOM CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS STUDENT OUTCOMES LIFE GOALS, CHOICES AND PATHWAYS PEDAGOGICAL INTERVENTIONS CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF CRRP RESEARCH PROGRAM 2003-2008

33. So – what did we find out?

34. Student Achievement Levels Is there evidence of an achievement crisis?

35. Do Singapore Students Outperform Western Students? Yes: TIMSS and in Mathematics and Science. Not participated in PISA... The gap between Singapore and the West will likely be smaller on PISSA than it is on TIMSS, just as it is for other East Asian countries. Singapore students will vary in how well they perform across different kinds of tasks, as East Asian and Western students have in both TIMSS and PISSA. Indeed, it’s possible that Western students will do slightly better than Singaporean students in on some kinds of creative, non-routine open-ended questions (Cai 1997, 1998, 2000; Leung, 2006, pp. 21-50; Wu, 2006, 2008; Wang and Lin 2005; Tatusoko 2005).

36. TIMSS Results 2003, Mathematics, Grade 4 and 8 Source: http://timss.bc.edu/timss2003i/mathD.html

37. Student Motivation Is there evidence of a motivational crisis? Culture trouble? Legitimation Crisis?

38. School Level Differences in Motivation & Engagement Note. All variables are measured on a 1-5 Likert scale

39. Student Compliance by Level/Subject

40. What Makes Education Valuable? Most Important Value

41. Value of Education

42. Student Values…

43. Singapore Post Secondary Students: What Do They Value?

46. Existential Aspirations _PS1

47. Human Capital Formation 1. How well prepared are young people for 21st century institutional environments? 2. Is there a human capital formation crisis? 3. How efficiently does cognitive achievement signal KBE knowledge, skills and dispositions

48. New Economy Competencies 48

49. NEW ECONOMY COMPETENCIES(Secondary 2)

50. Correlation: Measures of Human Capital Formation