Keynote SpeakersDeborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan, USA With an ever-increasing demand for mathematical literacy around the globe, the need for skilful teachers of mathematics has never been greater. An effective system of professional preparation rests on a coherent and detailed understanding of the work that teachers are expected to do. This matters because teaching is paradoxically both an utterly commonplace and fundamentally unnatural practice. Teaching centres on knowledge, but it is about helping others learn to know and do. It requires ways of working with groups of learners while being responsible for individuals' progress. This presentation will probe fundamental aspects of the teaching of mathematics that must be at the core of teachers' professional training in order to supply the number of skilled teachers needed to reach broader and higher levels of mathematical literacy.
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David C. Berliner, Arizona State University, USA The criteria by which one's activities are judged are always kept in mind and influence the behaviour of the person being evaluated, whether that person is an Olympic diver, a stock broker, or a teacher. The diver may concentrate on her entry into the water, the broker may be concerned with profits rather than morality, and the teacher will be concerned with student test performance. These are rational responses to evaluation. But the preoccupation with the use of test scores to judge teachers and schools in the US and elsewhere has resulted in many well-documented unfortunate occurrences: gaming the system; cheating; treating students inappropriately; and the one that may ultimately have the most economic impact, narrowing the curriculum. Evidence exists that the number of hours in the school week is greatly higher in reading and language arts, and mathematics, the tested subjects. While the hours per week are down dramatically in subjects such as social studies, history, art, music, physical education, and even science, the subjects not tested in the U.S. accountability scheme called No Child Left Behind (NLCB). What turns out to be rational responses to high-stakes testing may be hurting students, teachers, and the economic future of the USA.
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David Hogan, National Institute of Education, Singapore
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Erica McWilliam, National Institute of Education, Singapore Many of the changes we have predicted have been proven wrong - the millennium bug, the paperless office, more leisure time - all flawed predictions. Meanwhile we continue to see crucial changes which few of us ever anticipated - an African-American in the White House, global fiscal meltdown, the powerful impact of email on work, the Stanley knife used as a weapon of mass destruction. In this century we will continue to confront a future that is neither more of the same nor a predictable process of gradual improvement or decline. Change in the 21st century will be of an order that William Gosling calls "the knight's move". In other words, change will not be linear or regular in the future, yet neither is it likely to be chaotic. In anticipating irregular patterns of 21st century change, we are challenged to re-think "straight road" programmes of educational research and development, and the assumptions they make about the linear-cumulative nature of learning. Denied the "straight road", the knight is a powerful chess-piece in its ability to make strategic, irregular moves. It works best in the thick of the action, rather than on the margins. The knight is also somewhat differently deployed by Eastern and Western players. The knight's move can thus be a useful metaphor for imagining relevant moves in research and development in a new century. With an understanding of the knight's strengths and limitations, and its similarities and differences across East and West, we are better placed to understand the challenges of designing relevant programmes of educational research and professional development. In doing so, we can hope to build more epistemologically agile learning communities that can be proactive and powerful at the centre of the learning action.
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Magdalena Mok, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong Globalisation and the knowledge economy demand a renewed vision on pedagogy. Within this vision, Self-directed Learning Oriented Assessment (SLOA), in which learning and assessment are tightly integrated, offers a feasible alternative. There are three components of SLOA, namely, assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. This presentation focuses attention on assessment for learning and will present a field-tested model of implementation, comprising the design and development of a school-level assessment system; re-designing courseware for assessment and learning integration; effective use of the Rasch measurement model; development of continuous measurement scales in English and Mathematics; establishment of classroom-level Computer Adaptive Testing systems; and development of a Web-based reporting system for teachers, students and parents. Outcomes of the implementation will be drawn from empirical data from schools in China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
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Hannele Niemi, University of Helsinki, Finland The Finnish education system has received attention from all over the world because it came out on top in the PISA surveys. Finnish 15-year-olds have been number one in terms of skills in science, mathematics, the reading of literature and problem solving, and only very few students fall within the lowest PISA categories. Likewise, the differences between schools are small. A major reason for high learning outcomes can be seen as a result of a purposeful educational policy and a high standard of teachers. According to researchers, the educational policy has purposefully aimed at equity in education and has promoted the common comprehensive school model. In the process, many important decisions have been made. One of those has been the decision that all teacher education including primary school teachers was raised to the MA level (5-year programme). The structure and contents of teacher education aim at research and evidence-based orientation. Professors and supervisors of Finnish teacher education have the responsibility to guide students in the research-oriented aspects of their education. The main object of this guidance is not the completion of the Master's thesis itself, but actually to further the process by which students come to see themselves as actively studying and working subjects.
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Roy Pea, Stanford University Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Center, USA The combination of "always on" mobile computing, location-aware services, open platform technologies, participatory media culture, immersive worlds and games, and increasingly open educational resources provides an exciting horizon for the next decade of research and practice on technology-enhanced learning at all age levels. Exceptional resources for human learning and action will become continuously accessible through networks of information, people, and services. I will argue for the value of re-conceptualizing the nature of learning - from its goals to its infrastructures - and highlight key major research and theoretical challenges.
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Deborah Loewenberg Ball is Dean of the School of Education and William H. Payne Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on mathematics instruction, and on interventions designed to improve its quality and effectiveness. Her research groups study the nature of the mathematical knowledge needed for teaching and develop survey measures that make possible analyses of the relations among teachers' mathematical knowledge, the quality of their teaching, and their students' performance. Her research has been recognised with several awards and honours, and she has served on several national and international commissions and panels focused on policy initiatives and the improvement of education, including, most recently, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel.
David Berliner is Regents' Professor of Education at the Arizona State University. He has taught at the Universities of Arizona and Massachusetts, at Teachers College and Stanford University, as well as at universities in Australia, The Netherlands, Denmark, Spain and Switzerland. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, and a past president of both the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA). He is co-author of the best seller The Manufactured Crisis, of Putting Research to Work in Your School, and of the textbook Educational Psychology, now in its 6th edition. He is co-editor of the first Handbook of Educational Psychology, and of the books Talks to Teachers and Perspectives on Instructional Time. His newest co-authored book, Collateral Damage, is about the corruption of professional educators through high-stakes testing. Professor Berliner has also authored more than 200 published articles, technical reports and book chapters.
David Hogan is Professor and Dean of the Office of Education Research. Prior to that, he was Professor of Education at the University of Tasmania. He had earlier held an Associate Professorship and act as Director of the Education, Culture and Society Program at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Prof Hogan has won a series of awards for his work, including the American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award (1986), the Henry Barnard Prize, the History of Education Society Award, a Spencer Fellowship and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship.
Erica McWilliam is Professor of Education with the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Queensland University of Technology and a co-leader of the Creative Workforce Program in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Her scholarship covers a wide spectrum, as is evidenced in her numerous publications on creative capacity building, innovative teaching and learning, research methodology, and training and educational leadership and management. She is currently series editor of Eruptions: New Thinking Across the Disciplines, an academic series for Peter Lang Publishing, New York. Her latest book, The Creative Workforce, is published with UNSW Press in Sydney.
Magdalena Mok is Director of the Centre for Assessment Research and Development and Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology, Counselling and Learning Needs at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. She is internationally recognised for her research in educational assessment. Her particular research focus is Self-directed Learning Oriented Assessment in school education. She has undertaken numerous consultancy projects for the governments in Hong Kong and Australia on assessment policies and practice, one of them being the parallel projects entitled SAVIS and APASO, completed in 2002, of which outputs are used by primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong for external and internal school reviews.
Hannele Niemi serves as the first Vice-Rector responsible for academic affairs, university libraries, quality assurance and equality issues. She has acted as a researcher and scientific director of numerous international projects dealing with teaching and learning, and has served as an expert for the European Commission and the OECD. She has sat on or chaired a number of working groups related to higher education and teacher education. Her research interests focus on teaching and learning, the development of teacher education, technology-based learning environments as well as on ethical questions and values related to teaching. She has served as a keynote lecturer in several international forums. A highlight in her international career was her membership in the Steering Committee of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme in Britain between 2003 and 2008.
Roy Pea is Stanford University Professor of the Learning Sciences and Co-Director of the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Center. He has published widely on such topics as distributed cognition, learning and education fostered by advanced technologies including scientific visualisation, on-line communities, digital video collaboratories, and wireless handheld computers. His current work is developing a new paradigm for everyday networked video interactions for learning and communications, and for how informal and formal learning can be better understood and connected. He is a Co-Principal Investigator with the LIFE Center, one of several large-scale national Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation. He was co-author of the 2000 National Academy Press volume How People Learn. He founded and served as the first director of the learning sciences doctoral programmes at Northwestern University (1991) and Stanford University (2001). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education, American Psychological Society, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association. In 2004-2005, he was President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. Roy also serves as a Director for Teachscape, a company he co-founded in 1999 that provides comprehensive K-12 teacher professional development services incorporating Web-based video case studies of standards-based teaching and communities of learners.
© 2008 National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
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