If there was a vaccine available to protect you from future depression and despair, would you take it? Would you want your children to take it? The World Health Organization predicts that in just 6 years, depression will become the second leading cause of disability worldwide. It is possible to be inoculated against future hopelessness, but it is not a shot that you need. Rather, there are "behavioral vaccines" - simple action steps that have been scientifically proven in clinical trials to increase people’s well-being. Some of them take less than 2 minutes a day. These vaccines don’t just make you happier; they also build your capacity to cope with difficult events later in life. This keynote presents an overview of several of these vaccines and shares recent, local research findings regarding their efficacy in the Singapore context with students and adults.

Many mathematical responses, suggestions and ideas are brought up by students in mathematics classrooms. Some may be unexpected, others unintelligible and yet others may express partial understanding, all of which require from the teacher a decision about how to address them. One such decision could be to probe students’ proposals in order to assess their understanding. Sometimes, this decision can be challenging but at the same time it may open interesting opportunities for learning not only mathematical content and also about mathematics. Examples and dilemmas will be presented and discussed.

In any course or programme, what we assess students on and how we assess them can be expected to drive the learning behaviour. It is therefore important for assessments to be designed in a fashion aligned to the objectives of the course or programme. In this talk, we shall discuss the desired learning outcomes for an undergraduate education in mathematics and how they should influence the way assessment is conducted. However, in what way would this topic (of undergraduate mathematics) be of relevance and concern to the mathematics educators in the schools? The speaker will attempt to explain the connections, drawing on his experience both as an educator of undergraduate mathematics and a consultant for mathematics textbooks for secondary schools.

In education, assessment often drives teaching, which in turn leads to different learning outcomes. Much has been investigated and written about the triad of assessment – teaching – learning. Some touch on perennial issues such as reliability and validity, while others deal with more contemporary concerns such as assessment of, for, and as learning. This presentation will review trends about these perennial and contemporary issues in mathematics education, in particular, since the first AME Mathematics Teachers Conference held in 2005, which had Assessment as its theme and the publications of the 2011 AME Yearbook on Assessment. A historical journey through past practices may suggest fruitful strategies for the future.

Any assessment rests on three key components: cognition, observation, and interpretation. To have an effective assessment, all three components must be explicitly coordinated as part of the design. In this lecture, we will explore how all three elements can be based on knowledge of how students learn and how such learning can be measured in the context of a Calculus flipped classroom.

Assessment in mathematics serves many purposes and can be intended for a range of audiences. This talk focuses on the assessment and learning of mathematics that happens in classrooms. In that context both teachers and students are involved in both learning and assessing. For teachers assessment provides information about their students as learners of mathematics, while for students assessment tells them about themselves as mathematics learners. The most useful assessments help teachers to be better teachers and students to be better learners of mathematics. The talk will consider the messages that assessments convey and nature of assessment tasks that provide the most useful information for both students and teachers. Examples will be used to illustrate how assessment can be used to promote the learning of both students and teachers.

Singapore has participated in TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) since 1995. Every four years TIMSS takes place. A large corpus of data is collected during every cycle of the study. The rich national and international data can be used by educators to study aspects of the enacted school mathematics curriculum. In this talk, the 2011 data will be used to explore achievement of primary 4 pupils in both the content and cognitive domains of the mathematics test.