Tag Archives: Singapore

World insight: building a study abroad programme that works

Trisha Craig on the changing face of study abroad programmes 

Published by Times Higher Education, Dec. 27, 2016

For me, study abroad conjures up images of smiling students at the Uffizi gallery in Florence learning about the treasures of Western art, or trekking along the Great Wall while studying the history of imperial China.

Beyond these Instagram-worthy moments, however, what are the real goals and benefits of study abroad programmes? The past century of student mobility shows that the answer is both multifaceted and linked to the broader aims of higher education.

Larger cultural, economic and political forces shape the rationale and the demand for types of programmes. In the aftermath of the two world wars, developing cross-cultural understanding was the focus of many exchanges in the hope that it would lead to peace among nations, while during the Cold War, a security perspective led to increased spending on language programmes and study abroad. Continue reading …

World insight: designing experiential learning at Yale-NUS College

To effectively embed experiential learning, the whole university needs to buy into the idea, says Trisha Craig

Published by Times Higher Education, July 24, 2016
As is well known, liberal arts institutions (and indeed the notion of the liberal arts itself) are under pressure from many quarters. Politicians, funders and parents fear that the model of more general – rather than vocational – training may be both inadequate and too expensive for the economic conditions of slow growth, wage stagnation and underemployment that many advanced economies face. While such fears are real, and are particularly exacerbated in the US where the debt that many students and their families take on to finance university education is high, there is something of a disconnect between the view of the liberal arts’ irrelevance and the needs of the modern economy. Few actually contend that vocational education alone is in the best interest of growth and competitiveness. Continue reading …

Learn locally to think globally

Trisha Craig considers how universities can help foster in their students a lifelong commitment to community service

Published by Times Higher Education, April 29, 2016

For university administrators tasked with international strategy, there is hardly a term more widely bandied about than “global citizenship”. If we examine the websites of myriad institutions or the formulations of leaders, it appears that one of the goals higher education has set for itself today is the creation of global citizens. Such a task sounds sensible enough in an increasingly globalised world and implicitly references the historic mission of education to inculcate civic values in those who would go on to play important roles in their communities. Yet global citizenship is a more complicated and contested concept than citizenship, in part because there is no direct parallel in the international arena to the nation state that confers citizenship. Continue reading …

World insight: Banging the drum for liberal arts in East Asia

Countries like Singapore are turning to broad-based education just as the US turns away from it, says Trisha Craig

Published by Times Higher Education, February 19, 2016

There is some irony in the fact that at the very moment that the liberal arts model of education is under attack in the West as impractical and irrelevant, it is being embraced in Asia. Places that routinely post the top international test scores in maths and science – the likes of Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea as well as India and China – have moved to create new undergraduate liberal arts programmes or colleges, adopting the broad-based education that defines some of the US’ finest institutions. Continue reading …

The benefits of international experience: Europe’s lessons for Asia

To coincide with International Education Week, the US State Department’s reminder of the value of work and study abroad, I wrote this piece for Today.  It looks at a recent EU study of the Erasmus program, the student mobility scheme that has helped hundreds of thousands of young Europeans study and work elsewhere in the European Union, and applies the lessons to Asia.  In Singapore, where policy makers worry that the mismatch of labor market needs with the skills of graduates may raise unemployment as it has elsewhere in the world, the ASPIRE commission has urged that more work experience be integrated into study at the tertiary level.  Using the Erasmus impact study results, I suggest that the benefits of international study or work experience for students in terms of employability should not be overlooked.  Continue reading →

Practice makes Professionals

Singapore’s Lien Foundation, which has a strong interest in education and the early childhood sector recently teamed up with one of the largest childcare providers, St. James’ Church Kindergarten to establish a Practicum Centre. That will allow trainee teachers a better experience as they learn to be teachers than they often currently receive.  With better mentoring and a sense of the profession they are entering, the hope is they will both be better teachers and make a career in a sector with a stubbornly high attrition rate.  Here is a piece on the importance of this I published in Today using data from a recent survey I conducted.

Practice Makes Professionals

by Trisha Craig

(op-ed published by Today, August 18, 2014)

Last week’s announcement by the Lien Foundation and St James’ Church Kindergarten that they would be launching a new Practicum Centre for pre-service pre-school teachers heralds a welcome addition to the early childhood education sector.

Designed to provide high-quality mentoring to student teachers during their mandatory classroom teaching, the new centre hopes to enhance the practical skill set of young teachers and help set the stage for a satisfying career as pre-school professionals.  Continue reading →

Rising in the Ranks

Yesterday, the 2014 Shanghai Rankings, the influential global ranking of universities by Jiao Tong University in China, were released.  Singapore continued its upward rise as its two leading universities saw spectacular gains. The National University of Singapore (NUS) fell just short of breaking into the top 100 as it rose from 134 to 111, while Nanyang Technological University (NTU) now ranks 190th in the world, up from 269.

Singapore’s continued success comes at a time when the higher education landscape in Singapore is changing.  In order to meet the goal of raising the proportion of the young population with a university degree to 40% by 2020, which is comparable to the average in the OECD and up from 27% just two years ago, the government established the 5th autonomous (national) university, Singapore Institute of Technology last year and opened full time degree programs at another. The degrees at these institutions are mostly in applied fields and particularly geared to offer Polytechnic graduates the chance to top up their 3 year diplomas to bachelor’s degrees.

Raising the skills of the population is essential for Singapore to maintain its globally competitive position. But the always pragmatic Singaporean government seems to be signaling a shift in where it sees higher education going; it is now stressing that key skills need not necessarily come from a university degree.

Tomorrow’s National Day Rally (NDR), which is the annual occasion for the Prime Minister to lay out the policy priorities for the coming year, will take place at the Institute for Technical Education, a vocational and technical training institution, rather than at NUS where it is traditionally held. PM Lee Hsien Loong reportedly will focus on the importance of attaining skills though programs that combine study and work, not through a solely academic track.

Convincing parents that their children’s success in ultra-competitive Singapore does not require a degree will be a bit of an uphill battle as politicians recognize.  In advance of the NDR speech, Irene Ng, a Member of Parliament for the ruling party who sits on the Education Committee in Parliament is quoted in the Straits Times as saying: “a university degree is not a must-have to advance in life and do well. This will require quite a cultural shift in a society which has traditionally placed top emphasis on academic qualifications.”

But the alternative – too many degree holders for jobs that do not exist and a shortage of people with in-demand technical skills – would potentially slow the economy and create potentially greater public dissatisfaction than fewer degree places in universities.

As Singapore’s top universities rise in the global rankings, the country is also trying to raise the life chances of average citizens by expanding pathways beyond universities.

 

Not yours for the taking

(Op-ed published by Today, Aug. 1, 2014)

By Trisha Craig

Plagiarism, or taking other people’s words and ideas and passing them off as one’s own, has burst into the news in the past week. While many universities around the world consider it a silent epidemic, the very public transgressions of Mr Benny Johnson, a high-profile editor of popular Internet site Buzzfeed, and United States Senator John Walsh have cast a bright light on the issue of the proper attribution of source material and brought it into the open.

As unfortunate as these instances are, they act as a reminder that plagiarism can have severe and career-damaging consequences. In the case of the editor, his bosses fired him after finding more than 40 instances of plagiarism in his recent posts, while revelations that the Senator copied parts of his 2007 Master’s thesis at the prestigious US Army War College has put both his degree and re-election into jeopardy.

In higher education, faculty and administrators grapple with the issue of plagiarism which, while less headline grabbing, is commonly viewed as an endemic and growing problem on college campuses across the globe. Intellectual fraud does not occur only in the classroom — top universities now routinely check their admissions essays for pilfered paragraphs.

Many explanations for the rise in plagiarism are offered. They suggest a downward spiral that is hard to stop: Compared with the past, there is less social stigma, punishments are less harsh, detection is more difficult and pressures on students to excel are greater. In short, the risk and reward calculus has shifted and, as more people cheat and roughly get away with it, the numbers continue to rise. Continue reading …

Start teaching maths and science early

(Op-ed published by Today, June 24, 2014)

By Trisha Craig

Recently, Mr Heng Swee Keat, the Education Minister, highlighted the importance of transforming Singapore’s education system to keep up with changes in the economy. In particular, Mr Heng stressed the need to help students build skills in problem-solving and applying knowledge.

Among other ideas, he said schools must provide our children a strong foundation in literacy and numeracy, and give them a good grounding in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). How do we do that? One of the ways to promote an affinity for STEM is to start early by incorporating maths and science into the early childhood curriculum.

The National Science Board (NSB) in the United States said exposing young children to scientific concepts makes them more comfortable with those ideas when they are older.

Additionally, early knowledge of maths is a good predictor not only of aptitude in the subject later in life, but also of reading ability. The NSB has encouraged the introduction of STEM into pre-school education, an idea that has been supported by many business groups that also worry about the workforce of tomorrow.

Such a suggestion is likely to make some parents recoil in horror, fearing that this will further chip away at the carefree aspect of childhood, pressuring children with more academic work at ever younger ages. Actually, though, that idea of rote learning, which many of us associate with our own experience of learning maths and science, could not be further from the notion of how children best learn science and maths. Continue reading …

 

 

Mind the word gap

(Op-ed published by Today, May 2, 2014)

By Trisha Craig

Singaporean parents famously spare no expense when it comes to ensuring their children’s educational success, with estimates that up to 90 per cent of youngsters take tuition classes from early ages. But one of the most important investments parents can make to improve children’s learning outcomes is free. It turns out to be much more critical than enrichment programmes: It is talking to them.

This may sound like common sense and part of every family’s daily routine but a growing body of evidence shows that a massive word gap exists between children from disadvantaged families compared with their middle-class counterparts. Researchers in the United States note that by the time a poor child is three years old, she will have heard 30 million fewer words than a wealthier peer.

This is because of the patterns of interactions between parents and children in different kind of households. It turns out that, on average, less well-off parents speak less to their children, especially before children have developed language abilities, and the kind of speech tends to be more directive: “Stop that” or “Pick up your toys”.

Children are less likely to develop expansive vocabularies with directed speech because it requires little in the way of response and does not elicit conversation.

Interactive speech, more common among the middle class, forces children to search for words and use them: “What should we do at the playground today?” or “Let’s tell your little brother a story — what kind would he like?” Continue reading …