Coding the transformation of Chinese pedagogical practices in Singapore primary schools: A study of experiment

In Singapore, the education system has been successively tried and tested by language-ineducation planning initiatives and pedagogical innovations over the past half an century. In order to change the current “unproductive” classroom practice, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has developed and experimented a modular approach in Grade 1 and Grade 2 of 25 primary schools since mid-2005. To find out whether the teaching principles of the curriculum are implemented in the classroom, we have designed a research project and used a classroom coding approach to explore whether the teaching principles and pedagogical emphasis of the new approach are achieved at the level of implementation. While this paper reports the major findings and their implications for future curriculum development in Singapore, it is our hope that our conclusions also shed some light on some other education systems as a whole.