Lee Kuan Yew’s Thoughts About Research, Education and Universities

In 1959 when Lee Kuan Yew addressed members of Nanyang University, he had the foresight to recognise the core function of a university. He said that “the worth of a university is the contribution to human knowledge” (Lee 1959). Then in 1980, in an address to university staff at the Singapore Conference Hall and Trade Union House, he said, “We will encourage research, preferably research with relevance to the economy or to society” (Lee 1980). Lee believed in the importance of research being of relevance to the economy and to the larger society. In that same speech, Lee continued to argue for the importance of lifelong professional learning: “My test of an educated person is a simple one. Has he been schooled to a point where on his own he continues to probe, to learn, to read, and to solve problems for himself? Has he got an inquiry frame of mind?” (Lee 1980). Collectively, these ideas have had a significant impact on the development and continued progress of universities in Singapore. This chapter will use National Institute of Education (NIE), an autonomous institute within Nanyang Technological University (NTU), as an example to illustrate how Lee’s ideas have shaped research activities, innovation, and enterprise at NIE.

Singapore and the Singapore Education Context

Singapore is a small and highly urbanised city state. The total population comprises 5.47 million, with 3.87 million residents and 1.6 million non-residents (Singapore Department of Statistics 2014). In 2014, the Chinese formed the majority of 74% of the resident population, followed by the Malays with 13%, Indians at 9.1 and 3.3% Others (e.g. Eurasian) (Singapore Department of Statistics 2014). Singapore’s per capita GDP of US$55,182.5 in 2013 makes it second highest in Asia (highest being Macao SAR, China at US$91376.0) (World Bank 2014).

There are a total of 365 schools in Singapore including 182 primary schools (Grades 1–6), 154 secondary schools (Grades 7–10), 15 mixed level schools (primary and secondary, or secondary and junior college), and 14 junior colleges (Grades 11–12) and centralised institutes (Ministry of Education 2014). All publicly-funded schools use English Language as the medium of instruction and cater to almost all Singaporean students of school-going age.

Research and Development in Singapore

Research, innovation, and enterprise are important to Singapore’s well-being and future sustainability. There is significant investment in Research and Development (R&D) with the expenditure rising steadily from US$553 million (S$760 million) in 1991 to US$4.7 billion (S$6.5 billion) in 2010, and the government has further committed US$11.7 billion (S$16.1 billion) from 2011 to 2015. The National Research Foundation (NRF) oversees R&D, Innovation and Enterprise in Singapore. It coordinates research efforts with the Ministries of Trade & Industry, Education, Health, and Defence. It also works with R&D funding agencies, institutes of higher learning, and national research institutes. More specifically, educational research is primarily managed by the Ministry of Education (MOE).

Educational Research in Singapore

The National Institute of Education (NIE) is the leading agency for education research in Singapore. The main vehicle of funding is through the Education Research Fund (EdRF) made available by MOE to NIE. The aim of the EdRF is to develop programmes, innovations and interventions relevant to Singapore schools, MOE and NIE so as to test concepts, create products or processes that can improve the education system and to enhance teacher expertise and professionalism in key subject domains.

NIE’s Role in Advancing Educational Research in Singapore

At NIE, the Office of Education Research (OER) administers the Education Research Funding Programme (ERFP) , a pool of research funds provided by MOE. It also facilitates the governance, planning, monitoring, quality assurance, and dissemination of education research across the institute primarily through three research centres: Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice (CRPP) , Learning Sciences Lab (LSL) and the Education and Cognitive Development Lab (ECDL) .

CRPP was established in 2003 by NIE and funded by MOE to be an education research centre of excellence in pedagogy and practice. CRPP also conducts research to provide relevant and practical responses to persistent educational concerns and issues. LSL was set up in 2005 with the aim of incorporating information and communication technologies more fully into existing pedagogies to better engage students physically, emotionally and cognitively so as to improve learning outcomes. Today, LSL continues to explore learning and teaching wherever the action is. The central goal is to involve children and adults in creating opportunities to make learning not only possible but available and better. ECDL was set up in 2014 to examine research in four thematic areas: Applied Cognitive Development, Atypical Development, Bilingual Development, and Intervention. Using a combination of techniques ranging from behavioural assessment, classroom observation, brain imaging, and other bio-physiological measures, ECDL’s aim is to describe and understand the impact of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive capabilities, disposition, and out-of-school influences on their learning and development. A related objective is to identify factors that influence development, focusing specifically on the acquisition of skills and knowledge, and the effectiveness of schooling. Although much of ECDL’s work is focused on the development of basic understanding, the ultimate aim is to design pedagogical and individually focused intervention that optimises learning and development.

Through NIE’s 3 research centres, these research efforts are implemented through 6 research programmes covering 28 research themes. These 6 research programmes include the following:

  • Scaling, Translation and Knowledge Management

  • International Benchmarking

  • Teacher Learning and Professional Development

  • Curriculum and Instruction

  • Leadership, Organisation and System Studies

  • Learner’s Social and Cognitive Development.

The 28 research themes comprehensively cover diverse education areas such as applied social and cognitive development to assessment, leadership, teacher education, and knowledge management to name a few.

Investment in Educational Research

Dedicated and regular funding for education research began in 1999 in the form of EdRF made available by MOE to NIE with an annual budget of US$0.73 million (S$1 million). This initiative was in response to the 1997 Thinking Schools, Learning Nation policy (Gopinathan and Hung 2010). In January of 2003, MOE announced the award of US$34.45 million (S$47.29 million) to NIE to establish the CRPP. This was in line with MOE’s decision to establish NIE as a research-intensive institute focused on generating primary research findings from the local context to inform education policy and practice in Singapore.

NIE’s track record in both building up research and mobilising the knowledge generated to enrich policy deliberation, and to suggest new possibilities to improve classroom practice created the opportunity for CRPP to apply for a second five-year grant in 2007/08. This was based on a strategically-focused research, development, and innovation proposal that built upon the findings of the first 5 years and took into account MOE’s policy priorities, international research findings, and the changing institutional landscape of education in Singapore (Hogan 2007). MOE responded with a substantial grant of US$70.5 million (S$96.6 million). The Office of Education Research (OER) was set up in April 2008 to chart directions for NIE’s education research, manage and ensure the qualities of education research projects, and to enhance the linkage between NIE researchers, school practitioners, and MOE policymakers. In 2013, a third grant of US$86.80 million (S$118 million) was provided by the MOE to sustain and enhance NIE’s Education Research Funding Programme (ERFP). Over the past 15 years or so, MOE’s investment in educational research through NIE has been steady, consistent, and sustained.

Centre for Research and Development in Learning (CRADLE) at NTU

In May 2014, NTU announced that it will launch a US$22.31 million (S$30 million) centre to conduct research on Singapore’s tertiary education. Through research, CRADLE will seek to better understand, evaluate, and develop how to educate students in the 21st century skills and in today’s technologically-rich learning environment. Specifically, CRADLE seeks to understand how to remain student-centred in our pedagogy and to train students to be critical and inventive in their thinking, together with other 21st century skills. CRADLE will work closely with NIE, which has been at the forefront of investigating, developing, and implementing innovations in teaching and learning in Singapore since 1991. According to the 2015 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject released in April 2015, NTU’s Education programme, based at NIE, is among the top 10 in the world (Quacquarelli Symonds 2015).

Grants

There are various grants available that could further educational research objectives and these include the ERPF, the MOE Academies Fund (MAF) , eduLab Funding Programme , and Startup Grants (SUG) . Broadly, the ERPF supports strategic research of importance to MOE and the schools and of interest to NIE faculty. These grants also help NIE Academic Groups to develop their research programmes and to provide a resource to support especially new NIE faculty in developing research capacity. More specifically, the MAF supports projects that generate findings that can enhance teacher expertise and professionalism in key subject domains at the primary to junior college levels and they can be either development- or research-type projects. In contrast to research-type projects that focus on the creation of new knowledge or building of new theories, development-type projects aim to implement tested ideas or create implementable products, processes or frameworks to improve teaching and learning. The eduLab Funding Programme is an MOE-NIE initiative designed to surface and spread ground-up pedagogical innovations enriched by interactive digital media (IDM). For example, eduLab partners teachers in developing theoretically-informed IDM-enriched pedagogical innovations while ensuring that these innovations can potentially be adopted by different schools across the educational system. The Start-Up Grant (SUG) scheme is meant to provide NIE Academic Groups and Research Centres with the means to develop their research capacity. The SUG funds projects that aim at developing programmatic research that are in line with the broader aims of the ERFP, as well as projects by new academic faculty, which will help them develop research capacity to compete competitively for larger research grants.

Conditions for Building Strong Programmes of Highly Productive Scholarship

Teh et al. (2013) outlined three key conditions for building strong programmes of highly productive scholarship. First, prior to knowledge production, all stakeholders need to engage in collection deliberation to establish the key educational issues and to identify the relevant innovations that can not only address these issues, but are also congruent with the practitioner’s practical theory and knowledge, beliefs, values and norms (Dewey 1904; Hirst 1966; Sternberg 2006). In essence, stakeholders including researchers, practitioners, policymakers, parents and students should be engaged in informed dialogue (Reimers and McGinn 1997) to co-construct the evidence in light of local beliefs, knowledge, values and problems (Spillane and Miele 2007).

Second, university researchers do not work in isolation; rather, they work in collaboration with teachers, for example, in professional learning communities, and in carefully-designed, evidence-backed, strategically-focused projects so that educational knowledge can be generated, mobilised, and transformed into knowledge innovations to improve the quality of instruction and learning in situ. Third, teacher professional learning is central to improving the quality of instruction and learning and to bring knowledge innovations to fruition in classrooms and schools. Rather than traditional knowledge dissemination through stand-alone workshops, seminars or discussions, educational research should be generated through treating teachers as active learners and allowing them to engage in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, observation, and reflection in situ (Ball and Cohen 1999; Bransford et al. 2005; Fullan 2007; Hogan and Gopinathan 2008; Timperley and Alton-Lee 2008; Wilson and Berne 1999).

NIE’s Strategies to Engage in Theory-Practice Nexus and to Advance Education Research

Substantial Investment in the Development of Baseline Databases

A total of 6 strategies will be outlined. First, there is substantial investment in the development of baseline databases to support informed dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. In order to have an informed dialogue between researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, a rich and robust database that comprehensively describes the status of teaching and learning in Singapore classrooms, and leadership and organisation practices in Singapore schools is required. The substantial investment on CRPP’s CORE 1 and CORE 2 baseline studies (a baseline study on school leadership and organisational change, and a baseline study on primary school assessment practices) demonstrates NIE and MOE’s commitment to build this database. A representative sample of 25% of all Singapore primary and secondary schools, and 10% of teachers were involved in the CORE 1 and CORE 2 studies.

There was substantial dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Research findings were shared with school practitioners at multimodal platforms such as teacher forums and sharing sessions at the National and School Cluster levels. Dialogue was also conducted between NIE researchers and MOE policymakers on these baseline findings. Through these dialogues, NIE researchers and MOE policymakers share their views based on cutting edge research conducted worldwide and on policy imperatives grounded in the Singapore context. This information has formed the evidence base from which NIE’s educational research agenda and MOE’s innovation programmes have been developed. These key baseline findings also inform the design and delivery of pre-service programmes and in-service teacher professional development. Taken together, the rigour of these baseline studies and the extensive involvement of school practitioners and the in-depth discussions among the various stakeholders on the CORE findings, strengthen the relationship between research, policy, programme design and delivery, and practice, within the educational community in Singapore.

Professional Learning as a Strategy

Second, professional learning is a strategy to ensure knowledge mediation, application and impactful practice in a sustained manner. This is done by leveraging on NIE’s pre-service and in-service programmes. As NIE is the sole teacher training institute in Singapore and provides 70–80% of professional development courses for Singapore teachers, these pre-service teacher education and in-service professional development programmes are an effective avenue to ensure that knowledge is used by practitioners in a sustained manner. NIE’s pre-service and in-service programmes have a strong theory-practice nexus between teacher education and cutting edge education research. In NIE, this is facilitated by a majority of NIE faculty members being both active researchers and teacher educators. With the adoption of TE21 , a new teacher education model (National Institute of Education 2010), NIE is also strengthening the theory-practice nexus within Singapore classrooms. Within TE21, pre-service programmes and in-service teacher professional development programmes have adopted a structured mentorship model to increase the likelihood of teachers adopting new practices based on explicit knowledge received from the programme and feedback from their mentors.

NIE has a dedicated publication unit (housed in OER) to translate and disseminate its research findings through regular print and online media. Currently, three international peer-reviewed journals are managed by NIE, spanning multiple disciplinary foci including pedagogical research, Asian education, and the learning sciences. NIE also organises regular academic conferences, which are well attended by Singaporean teachers. Practitioner-oriented publications are also produced and distributed to schools and the MOE and are available online. Such publications highlight ongoing and completed NIE research as well as educational and practitioner themes that are helpful to teachers, school leaders, policymakers, and curriculum designers.

Design Research as a Research Approach

The third strategy is to use design-based research as an approach to incorporate rich contextual information and practitioner knowledge. Design-based research is iterative as researchers and practitioners collaborate to engage in the design of the interventions in classroom settings. This process ensures research takes place in the relevant context, that theories of learning are developed and refined, and that researchers and teachers engage in re-design and continue the cycle of design and implementation.

Design research is therefore often characterised as interventionist, iterative, process-oriented, utility-oriented, and theory-oriented (Van den Akker et al. 2006). The close collaboration of researchers and practitioners throughout the course of the research enhances and facilitates the incorporation of the tacit dimension of practitioner knowledge in the systematic explication of the research process. It is an approach that meets the needs of the practitioners because it supports co-design, learning design, curriculum development, technology development, and professional development—thereby actualising the iterative knowledge mobilisation cycle. Many of the LSL interventions have reported success in terms of positive changes in student outcomes and teacher competency and satisfaction (e.g. Kapur 2010; Looi et al. 2011; Wong et al. 2011).

Developing a Distinctive Suite of Signature Programmes

The fourth strategy is developing a distinctive suite of signature programmes. NIE is developing a number of programmes that are multi-disciplinary, evidence-based, and research-informed. These programmes are also robust in disciplinary and pedagogical rigour, infused with global perspectives and strong industry links, and are values-based for well-rounded character development. An example of such a programme is the Nanyang Technological University-NIE Teaching Scholars Programme (TSP) , which is designed to develop a core group of high-calibre and deeply passionate beginning teachers with intellectual rigour, strong leadership qualities, global perspectives, and a keen desire to make significant contributions to education. TSP students will be offered a range of education-related local and overseas immersion opportunities as well as opportunities to undertake a multi-disciplinary curriculum at NTU.

Enhancing Partnerships

The fifth strategy is to enhance partnerships with universities and key stakeholders to grow teaching, and research productivity and impact. NIE actively seeks and cultivates strategic partnerships with local and international Institutes of Higher Learning. NIE keeps abreast with global education trends and cultivates new strategic partnerships and joint higher degree/executive programmes with other renowned Institutes of Higher Learning, including Teachers College, Columbia University, Boston College, and Institute of Education London. This enables NIE to provide global perspectives and immersion opportunities for students across all programmes including initial teacher preparation, higher degrees, and teacher professional development. Such partnerships will also allow NIE to broaden the impact on the global education fraternity.

A key success factor for Singapore’s high performance in international education benchmarks is the close partnership and alignment between NIE, MOE, and schools in Singapore. While MOE is responsible for policy formulation, NIE is responsible not just for translating these policies in the design and delivery of teacher education programmes, but also for providing research evidence to help shape future policies. The schools work in close partnership with NIE by providing spaces for research and teaching experience, and this is especially crucial for beginning teachers to grow to become professionals. By forging continued collaborations with MOE, the aim is to leverage the professional capacities of Singapore’s educators to deliver rigorous, relevant and responsive executive and professional development programmes for both in-service teachers and school leaders. The ultimate goal of such strong partnerships is a coherent teleological alignment across all stakeholders: enhancing the learning outcomes of students in our school system.

Investment in Enhancing Research Capabilities

The final strategy is continued investment in enhancing research capabilities. NIE continues to invest resources in the development and mentorship of young and talented researchers and provide substantial support for research initiatives that have an impact on programmatic and pedagogical enhancements, both within NIE and in schools. This is achieved through knowledge transfer mechanisms such as inviting distinguished researchers and academics to NIE as visiting staff, to mentor, and train local researchers. In particular, their global and international perspectives, strong academic networks, and scholarly productivity have helped NIE staff in enhancing their research capacities.

NIE’s Research Development and Innovation Framework

Using Stokes’ (1997) framework in a very different context, we might describe some university educational research as rigorous but not relevant, some university educational research as neither relevant nor rigorous, some university educational research as relevant but not rigorous, and some as both rigorous and relevant (Pasteur’s Quadrant). We can formalise this taxonomy in a 2 × 2 matrix borrowed from Tushman and O’Reilly (2007) and reported in Table 8.1 (Teh et al. 2013, p. 50).

Table 8.1 Relevance and rigour in educational knowledge production
Full size table

Scholarly productivity that counts as valuable knowledge must therefore be located within Pasteur’s Quadrant and researchers should engage in rigorous and relevant research, thereby tightening the research-practice nexus. In fact, relevance and rigor are two of three key value propositions for NIE. The third—responsiveness—alludes to the prompt and timely utilisation and dissemination of education research findings to key stakeholders so that such research knowledge can inform their decision-making processes.

Therefore, NIE’s research development and innovation framework encompasses four categories and this fully caters to the needs and interests of its key stakeholders:

This framework is subsequently refined around four categories to fully cater to the needs and interests of its key stakeholders: Strategic Research Development and Innovation ; Priority Innovation and Intervention ; Scaling, Translation and Knowledge Management ; and Blue-Sky Research Development and Innovation .

Strategic Research Development and Innovation

Strategic Research Development and Innovation refers to basic and applied research that promotes better understanding about the pattern and logic of learning and teaching. These studies are of interest to both MOE and the broader education fraternity, and aim to contribute to the design and implementation of effective learning and teaching programmes. Findings from Strategic Research Development and Innovation research are intended to have significant impact on classroom practices in the medium-to-long term of 5–10 years.

Priority Innovation and Intervention

These studies encompass the design, development and implementation of sustainable innovations, which focus on improving practices in Singapore schools to meet the priority needs of students and teachers. With a central focus on intervention and use, their findings are intended to have significant impact on school practices in the short-to-medium term of 3–5 years.

Scaling, Translation and Knowledge Management

These studies include research activities that bring about the: (i) integration, synthesis and translation of knowledge created in NIE with knowledge and findings from cutting-edge and state-of-the-art international research; and (ii) identification, growing, levelling up and scaling of knowledge to sustain system-wide impact on learning and teaching. The expected time frame for these types of research is between 1 and 3 years.

Blue-Sky Research Development and Innovation

This programme encompasses studies that are curiosity-driven and initiated by researchers. Blue-Sky Research Development and Innovation allows researchers the flexibility and freedom to compete for grants to pursue “out-of-the-box” or “over the horizon” education research, which may not be of immediate interest to NIE or MOE.

Challenges Ahead

Slavin (2008) observed that reforms of education programmes and practices are often influenced more by ideology, faddism, politics, and marketing than evidence. Policymakers, teacher educators, practitioners, and educational researchers are often pulled apart by conflicting views of educational research. Labaree (2008) argues that the effort to make educational research more relevant can be counterproductive as practitioners/teachers and researchers have different orientations towards education. Practitioners/teachers are immersed in a web of pedagogical goals, social contexts and instructional relationships while researchers are embedded in intellectualized and decontextualised realms of educational theory. Labaree (2008) suggests that one way to embrace this challenge is to take advantage of the tension and differences, to acknowledge and honour the different zones of expertise and to promote a fruitful dialogue between practitioners/teachers and researchers. Both provide useful alternative perspectives, with each providing what the other is lacking.

Nelson et al. (2015) noted that a major challenge of education research in research universities is the incentive structure that rewards scholarship over community engagement and theory building over applied knowledge. They observed that “often the research questions posed by academic researchers do not match the needs of the communities in which the research occurs.” (Nelson et al. 2015, p. 18). Nelson et al. (2015) highlighted in their findings that the key is the building of mutually beneficial university-community research partnership. In many ways, educational research in Singapore, has taken on an approach of grounding research in community problems. Tan (2015) emphasised that the genesis of educational research is the classroom and ultimately, research must inform practice to the benefit of the learner in the community. The synergy and coherence of objectives among the university, MOE, and schools is a positive characteristic of the Singapore’s approach in research activities. In many ways, though there are still obvious challenges ahead, Lee has laid the foundation for such connectivity and focus as there was always a rigorous administration of resources, and alignment was essential to ensure optimal use of funding with pragmatic outcomes. This chapter reviewed how research advancement in Singapore has been supported by the Singapore government’s generous funding and how administrative support centres have been set up at NIE to facilitate and nurture this growth. The Singapore government’s commitment of over US$190 million to grow educational research signals its importance and priority to Singapore. Lee’s early ideas and thoughts about research continue to shape the development of educational research in Singapore and at NIE to the present day. NIE also promotes and strengthens programmes of highly productive scholarship by investing in human capital and research capabilities, cultivating key partnerships, encouraging professional learning, and having sustained dialogue in the school context with all stakeholders including researchers, practitioners, policymakers, parents, and students. This way, NIE’s research remains relevant, rigorous, and responsive, fulfilling what Lee envisaged as the worth of a university.