Moving Singapore from great to excellent : How educational research informs this shift

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The McKinsey report on how the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better evaluated Singapore as a “great” system (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010). While the report identifies factors, such as high quality teachers, that enable high-performing systems to do well, it does not provide suggestions on how countries can shift from “great” to “excellent”. This paper takes a systemic, ecological view to discuss how educational research invested in five levels of the education system― the history and society; cross systems; whole system; school; and classroom levels― can yield research findings that may inform Singapore on how to make this shift. Three areas of change are proposed to help Singapore’s efforts towards excellence ？ 1) a more balanced teacher-centric and student-centric pedagogy, 2) improving the performance of lower achieving students, and 3) greater diversity of talent recognition beyond academic achievements.

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