Teaching towards big ideas provide opportunities for teachers to think deeply about content and pedagogy in order to support their students to see connections in mathematics. However, teachers may not always activate or mobilise their knowledge in classroom situations. This paper looks into how a teacher, Peter, think about the tasks in his…

Big Ideas can be seen as overarching concepts that occur in various mathematical topics and strands within a syllabus. Within our project on Big Ideas in School Mathematics, we developed instruments to measure two Big Ideas: Equivalence and Proportionality. The instruments we developed seek to assess students' ability to see these Big Ideas as…

This study seeks to offer a comparative analysis of the History of Mathematics (HoM) elements identified in the secondary school mathematics textbooks of different countries. Drawing on document analysis method, this study analyzes the secondary school mathematics textbooks of Turkey, Singapore, Ireland and Canada. The HoM elements in the…

Diagrams are succinct, visual representations of real-world or mathematical objects that serve to communicate properties of the objects and facilitate problem solving. This study explored perceptions of mathematics teachers in Singapore, who are heads of mathematics departments in their respective schools, related to diagrams and their use in the…

In this paper, the Singapore school calculus curriculum at the upper secondary and the pre-university levels is examined in the light of the Singapore mathematics curriculum framework. Three key features of the calculus content are discerned: (1) an intuitive approach to calculus supported by the use of technology; (2) an emphasis on techniques;…

This paper reports on one aspect of a bigger project: teachers' design of instructional materials. We found a number of design moves used by the teachers in our study. In this paper, we report three of them: Making things explicit, making connections, and resequencing practice examples. [This paper is the fourth in a symposium of four papers. For…

Textbooks, which form the staples of a teacher's set of resources, play a critical role in deciding what and how mathematics is taught in classrooms. However, textbooks do not always present concepts in ways that enhance understanding by students, nor are they always comprehensive in the treatment of a topic. In this exploratory study, we analyse…

A case study of calculus instructional material (comprising of lecture notes and tutorial practice worksheets) designed by teachers from a Singapore pre-university is presented in this paper. As textbooks have not been available for mathematics at the pre-university levels, the instructional material was a product of the teachers' collaborative…

A model of instruction is a set of strategies that guide teachers in their instructional practice. The purpose of this paper is to dispel the myth that mathematics teaching in Singapore schools is all about drill and practice, as perceived of many Asian systems. This paper draws on data of a large project that examined the enactment of school…

When mathematics teachers plan lessons, they interact with curriculum materials in various ways. In this paper, we draw on Brown's (2009) "Design Capacity for Enactment" framework to explore the practice of "adapting" curriculum materials in the case of a Singapore secondary mathematics teacher. Problems from the textbook used…

This paper reports how 30 experienced and competent Singapore secondary mathematics teachers attempted to imbue desired attitudes in their students and some possible factors that might have influenced the teachers' choice of instructional approaches. It was found from the analysis of lesson observations of these teachers that most of those…

This is a common experience among education researchers: we notice a surprising instructional move enacted by a teacher. After deeper reflection, we ask, "How many other teachers in Singapore do this?" In this paper, we describe an instrument we designed that is part of the resource needed to answer such questions. [This paper is the…

"The Enactment Project" seeks to find out in more detail what is happening in Singapore mathematics classrooms. In particular, the video data of 30 teachers suggests that there is a distinctive Singapore secondary mathematics pedagogy, almost like its DNA, which is characterized by cycles of Development, Seatwork and Review (DSR). This…

This study aims to reveal the similarities and differences in the secondary mathematics curricula (SMC) of Turkey, Estonia, Canada, and Singapore during the 2018-2019 academic years by comparing them in terms of the curriculum components. In this context, the horizontal approach technique, one of the comparative education approaches, was used in…

This paper provides an overview of a programmatic research project, the Enactment Project, at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. The project studies the enactment of school mathematics by competent experienced teachers in secondary schools and also how widespread practices of these competent experienced teachers are in the…