A Study of the Enacted School Mathematics Curriculum in Singapore Secondary Schools

A study of the enacted secondary school mathematics curriculum in Singapore schools, was a programmatic research project at the National Institute of Education (NIE) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore through the Office of Education Research (OER) at NIE. The project had two aims. The first was to document how experienced and competent teachers enacted the school mathematics curriculum in secondary schools. It did this by examining: (i) pedagogies adopted by experienced and competent mathematics teachers when enacting the curriculum, and (ii) experienced and competent teachers’ use of instructional materials for the enactment of the curriculum. The second was to establish how uniform these adopted pedagogies and use of instructional materials by experienced and competent teachers were practised in the mathematics classrooms of Singapore schools. The project had two phases. The first was the video-segment and the second was the survey-segment. The survey-segment was dependent on the findings of the video-segment. The video-segment documented the pedagogy of experienced and competent secondary mathematics teachers while the survey-segment helped to establish how uniform the pedagogy of experienced and competent teachers was in the mathematics classrooms of Singapore schools. Thirty experienced and competent mathematics teachers and their students participated in the first phase, while another 691 mathematics teachers from across the schools in Singapore participated in the second phase. Data collected have been subjected to purposeful analysis, using appropriate methods. The following chapters in the book, present evidence-based portraits of mathematics teaching and learning in Singapore secondary schools.