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The Innovative Immersion of Mobile Learning into a Science Curriculum in Singapore: an Exploratory Study

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Abstract

With advancements made in mobile technology, increasing emphasis has been paid to how to leverage the affordances of mobile technology to improve science learning and instruction. This paper reports on a science curriculum supported by an inquiry-based framework and mobile technologies. It was developed by teachers and researchers in a multiyear program of school-based research. The foci of this paper is on the design principles of the curriculum and its enactment, and the establishment of a teacher learning community. Through elucidating the design features of the innovative curriculum and evaluating teacher and student involvement in science instruction and learning, we introduce the science curriculum, called Mobilized 5E Science Curriculum (M5ESC), and present a representative case study of how one experienced teacher and her class adopted the curriculum. The findings indicate the intervention promoted this teacher’s questioning competency, enabled her to interact with students frequently and flexibly in class, and supported her technology use for promoting different levels of cognition. Student learning was also improved in terms of test achievement and activity performance in and out of the classroom. We propose that the study can be used to guide the learning design of mobile technology-supported curricula, as well as teacher professional development for curriculum enactment.

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Notes

  1. The school academic year in Singapore comprises two semesters with each semester being constituted of two terms of about 11 weeks each.

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Acknowledgments

The paper is based on work arising from the research project “Bridging Formal and Informal Learning Spaces for Self-directed and Collaborative Inquiry Learning in Science” funded by the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF2011-EDU002-EL005). We would like to thank our collaborators and pilot school for working on our project.

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  1. Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, 10 Lo Ping Road, Tai Po, Hong Kong

    Daner Sun, Chee-Kit Looi, Longkai Wu & Wenting Xie

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  1. Daner Sun
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Correspondence to Daner Sun.

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Sun, D., Looi, CK., Wu, L. et al. The Innovative Immersion of Mobile Learning into a Science Curriculum in Singapore: an Exploratory Study. Res Sci Educ 46, 547–573 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-015-9471-0

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