Projects

Urbanisation and land reclamation have resulted in sand being stripped from the riverbeds of many major rivers around the world. Although river sand mining is widespread and cause a variety of environmental problems, data on sand mining rates is scant due to difficulties in monitoring sand mining activities.

To fill the knowledge gap, this proposal aims to develop a remote sensing-based Deep Learning approach to systematically map the sand mining activities in large rivers and to quantify for the first time, the annual sand extraction rates in the Mekong River.

The Mekong River was chosen as a representative case study for development of our method, because it has been mined intensively in the last 30 years with no signs of abating. We expect that our results will improve our understanding of the environmental impacts arising from sand mining activities, as these impacts are often compounded by the effects of other anthropogenic drivers such as upstream dams and groundwater extraction.

Our research will also be useful for determining sustainable mining rates that can be used by local governments to setup regulatory frameworks. Finally, we envision that the novel Deep Learning approach to be developed has high potential to be applied to other large rivers across the world.

How are smart city visions reshaping cities in India and South Africa? Since 2000, smart city visions – where data, software and IT infrastructures are seen as key in the success of urban management and sustainable development – has gained traction in many regions across the world. However, little is known about how these visions affect the agendas and initiatives of municipalities as well as acts of resistance, including counter-plans from urban social movements. It is this research gap that this comparative study, led by scholars based in Switzerland, the UK, South Africa and Singapore, will address.

Currently, the instruments and items used to measure students’ understanding of climate change is very summative in nature. There is nothing useful in the classroom for the teacher to diagnose learning and misconceptions. Assessment for learning is to help teachers and students monitor their progress and to identify the areas for improvement. It provides feedback to teachers and their students to make necessary changes in their learning activities to promote improvement and making learning more effective. While the climate change diagnostic test (CCDT) has been successful in correcting the students’ misconceptions, it is summative in nature and relies on how the teacher delivers his/her lessons. The challenge that most teachers face in a traditional classroom is the ability to provide feedback to all the students in class.

This study proposes that the use of augmented reality (AR) can adapt the CCDT for assessment for learning of CCE. The key feature about AR is its affordance in providing rapid information based on visual ques by overlaying of information onto the current view. This enables the users to see both the real world information and the augmented information on the same platform. Since all information is layered onto their worksheets, students have opportunities to reflect individually or in pairs on the instructions given to identify and correct misconceptions. The authors posit that the use of AR technology will help students correct their climate change misconceptions better.

Climate change is taught explicitly as a topic in the Singapore school geography curriculum. In responding to the city state’s desired outcomes of education and meeting its standards of twenty-first century competencies, it is important for learners to develop criticality and dispositions to engage climate change issues. Based on previous studies conducted by the PI over the last four years, it has been found that geography students have misconceptions about this topic that are similar to those found in other students around the world. In reviewing the literature on methodologies that support development, Learning Progression offers an empirics-based roadmap for building students’ holistic knowledge base and in confronting the fragmented and often incomplete understanding of the climate change issue. The study endeavours to answer the key question of how school geography curriculum can be designed and how it can be enacted in the classroom based on the outcomes of this research study. The methodology is adapted from the common practice of establishing a hypothetical learning progression (HLP), testing and validating the HLP to develop the empirical learning progression (ELP) before determining intervention strategies to test if students can learn climate change better through this approach. More importantly, the research study will inform the teaching and learning of climate change within the wider context of geographical and environmental education in the international community.

The primary objective of this project is to explore the policy trajectories of neoliberal high-tech urban development in Hyderabad and document the human geographies of resistance/resilience from the locals. Drawing from the theoretical lens of ‘splintering urbanism’ this project will seek to understand how neoliberalizing initiatives have impacted Hyderabad’s (un)sustainable urban development vis-a-vis emulating Singapore’s and Malaysia’s urban policies (e.g. installing modern infrastructure, setting up software enclaves). The project further aims to document the human geographies of high-tech development in Hyderabad by providing insights into the everyday practices of locals and analysing the ways in which high-tech Hyderabad have been accepted, resisted and negotiated through their everyday practices. Few scholars have analysed the role of human agency within the splintering urban landscape taking account of grounded, place-based narratives of people’s lived experiences and the ways people negotiate networked high-tech space – to live and to make a living. This project will attempt to fill-in some of these gaps and extend the ‘splintering urbanism’, theory to a city in the developing world.

Alongside mounting evidence of rapid changes in the global climate system is the growing concern on how to mitigate and adapt to these changes, and more importantly, on how to prepare future generations to its impact (International Panel on Climate Change, 2007). Indeed, climate change is a predicament with inter-generational consequences; the repercussions of decisions made in the present are borne by those who will inhabit the planet in years to come. To this, education is universally regarded as a key measure to pass on vital skills and knowledge, and essentially a catalyst of hope for humanity against the impending threats of climate change (Anderson, 2012). However, notwithstanding its relevance and currency, the phenomenon remains fundamentally misunderstood. Climate change literacy is yet to be developed as a skillset.

There is no dearth in research documenting the prevalence of false beliefs that make up general understanding of climate change. In fact, studies on how the topic is taught and learned in schools point to the chasm between awareness and understanding and the pervasiveness of misconceptions in students’ mental models (Daniel, Stanisstreet, & Boyes, 2007; Hansen, 2010; Kilinc, Stanisstreet, & Boyes, 2008; Lee, Lester, Ma, Lambert, & Jean-Baptiste, 2007). In addition, reports on interventions aimed at replacing bogus with correct knowledge have indicated the tenacity of these misconceptions (Gautier Deutsch, & Rebich, 2006; Lee et al., 2007).

Central to this proposal is the continuation of scholarly efforts by the Principal Investigator (PI) to push for greater and deeper engagement with the learning of climate change in Singapore’s schools. The project has three objectives. First, it intends to refine, strengthen and implement the Climate Change Diagnostic Test (CCDT), an instrument used to determine the nature of climate change knowledge, to a wider population of mixed demographics. Second, an intervention will be mounted to target resilient misconceptions through the use of refutation-based text and instruction. Findings from the CCDT data will inform the development of this teaching and learning programme. Third and foremost, it intends to translate research discoveries into practice by producing a teaching kit that is empirically grounded on the results of classroom-based studies contextual to Singapore.

In context, two previous research projects by the PI have set the ground for a more nuanced inquiry on the topic. The first grant (RS 1/11 CCH) made possible for the establishment of baseline data on what students and teachers know and do not know about climate change. The research also looked at how teachers of various disciplines perceive climate change education and the uses of climate literacy to the individual and society at large. A scholarly book was published with Routledge (Chang, 2014) in addition to several journal articles (Chang, 2013; Chang and Pascua, 2014) and conference presentation (Chang & Pascua, 2012).

The second phase (RS 5/12 CCH) specifically targeted the improvement of content understanding on climate change through triggering conceptual change. A professional development workshop was mounted for this purpose. Two teachers then agreed to be observed by the research team as they taught the topic in their respective classrooms. Simultaneously, identified misconceptions in the first phase were concretized into the CCDT (see Appendix) which was implemented in these two separate occasions. Following a case-based approach, class observations showed the fact that teachers’ enhanced understanding of the phenomenon was not enough to effectively recalibrate students’ alternative conception. Indeed, while significant improvement in understanding was observed in both events, the prevalence and resilience of a number of misconceptions were also noted. The deterioration of newly acquired understanding was also recorded such that some students reverted to their old misconceptions even when these appeared to have been successfully refuted by the intervention. New alternative conceptions were also observed to have developed at the end of treatment (see Preliminary Report). With these new discoveries, the proposed project will now aim to target resilient misconceptions through the use of refutation text and instruction, with a view to develop a viable and effective teaching and learning package.