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The word "test" comes to mind when a person, who is unacquainted with education discourses, reads about assessment issues. Beyond issues of reliability and validity in designing measurement constructs, assessment for school geography must result in better geographical learning. In other words, there must be "consequential validity" so that the way teachers collect information about students is aligned to the goals of improving learning. While geographical educators agree that finding out if someone has learnt what you intend for them to learn goes beyond performance in pen and paper examinations, school geography intends for children to learn beyond geographical knowledge. In fact, geographical educators are interested in evaluating if our students are better in developing skills that will help them be actively engaged and contributing citizens of the world that they are living in.

Since 2016 an international research process has been underway to design and develop an international geography assessment for implementation in lower secondary education settings. One of the crucial steps in this process is the development and validation of an assessment framework that models the content and cognitive dimensions of geography education to enable internationally valid, reliable, and fair measures of geographic constructs. This paper provides a rationale for an international assessment in geography and reports the findings of foundational research that produced the provisional assessment framework. Our methodology draws on the evidence-centered design to educational assessment development, which involves a sequential approach to domain analysis and modelling. The framework will guide the specifications for tasks and tests, evaluation procedures, and measurement models. The article concludes with a reiteration of the value of an international assessment and an outline of the activities moving forward.

This study identified secondary school students' alternative conceptions (ACs) of climate change and their resistance to instruction. Using a case-based approach, a diagnostic test was administered to Secondary 3 male students in a pre-test and post-test. The ACs identified in the pre-test were on the causes of climate change, the natural greenhouse effect and its properties, the enhancement of the greenhouse effect, the elements involved in heat-trapping and their characteristics. There were also notable ACs on the effects of climate change, mostly on how the phenomenon is related to nonatmospheric events such as tsunami, earthquakes, acid rain and skin cancer. The students confuse the Montreal with the Kyoto Protocol as the primary treaty aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas there was significant improvement in students' understanding in the post-test, the distribution of responses for each of the ACs showed that the reduction in erroneous responses was not sufficient to reject the ACs fully. The authors recommend that instruction should move beyond patchwork pedagogy to a more explicit acknowledgement, incorporation and direct refutation of misconceived knowledge structures.

Despite heightened awareness about climate change, individuals remain rather indifferent to the issue. The reasons being that many public education programmes rely essentially on information dissemination and do not help individuals understand the given information. The authors believe that there is potential of environmental education for understanding and promoting pro-environmental behaviour. The proposed transformative education for climate change (TrEC) programme focuses on three elements (knowledge, skills and values) to help individuals understand environmental issues and to empower them to take pro-environmental action. This mixed method study was conducted in collaboration with various government agencies and 173 residents in a housing estate in Singapore. The findings suggest that with better understanding (knowledge) about the climate change issue, individuals can make informed decisions (attitude) and be encouraged to adopt pro-environmental behaviour (action).

How school geography should be taught has been a longstanding issue for geography educators. In some countries, state or national level curriculum predicates how the subject should be taught in schools. This paper examines these questions in relation to existing frameworks of conceptualizing school geography, such as the International Charter on Geographical Education. School geography in Singapore has evolved from regional geography to thematic geography to systematic geography. A review of the curriculum in 2007 resulted in a distinct form of school geography unprecedented in Singapore's education history. Today, school geography in Singapore is learnt conceptually with national level assessment designed to that end. To what extent is this evolution in curriculum design in step with changes in our world? In response to the changes in school geography, pre-service and in-service teacher training has also responded by focusing on conceptual learning and inquiry. This paper will explore the state of school geography curricula in Singapore today, and the curriculum of teacher training, with the intent to critically discuss the state of geography education in Singapore. Although geography has remained a disciplinary subject whose place has yet been disputed, the big question of why study geography in the first place needs to be answered to ensure its continued survival. In particular, school geography will be examined for its relevance to a fast changing world. This critique ends by offering a reason to how geography plays an important role in education for sustainable development, and its relevance to Singaporeans or even any citizen of the world.

This article discusses the implementation of a pedagogical tool aimed at the refutation of secondary school (grade ten-equivalent) students' persistent climate change misconceptions. Using a lesson study approach, the materials and intervention techniques used were developed collaboratively with geography teachers. The objective is two-pronged: to closely monitor how children learn through refutation-oriented approach and to document how teachers process the experience. A pretest and post-test comparison showed that there was significant improvement in the students' climate change conceptual understanding following the intervention.

The inclusion of the climate change topic in the curriculum of school subjects in Singapore was pivotal, such that it positioned the discourse squarely in the structure of Singapore's education system. In an examination of the intersections and disjoints between state policies on climate change against the programmatic curriculum, results showed that there is no strong policy curriculum that mandates how climate change should be learned in Singapore, even though it is present in several school subjects. The topic is included in school subjects through the initiative of subject disciplinary specialists and middle managers of the education ministry. This exemplar has implications on how climate change education policy and practice can be shaped elsewhere.

Climate change is an important theme in the investigation of human-environment interactions in geographic education. This study explored the nature of students' understanding of concepts and processes related to climate change. Through semi-structured interviews, data was collected from 27 Secondary 3 (Grade 9) students from Singapore. The data was subjected to thematic analysis using Chi and Roscoe's conceptual change framework. The results showed that the students' base knowledge of climate change is composed of incomplete and incorrect elements built within coherent and structurally sound mental models. Due to the consistency of the models in expanding the logic, albeit erroneous, of explaining the climate change conundrum, it is posited that students are unaware of mistakes inherent in their judgements. Transformation of these mental models through multiple and deliberate refutations should be foremost in a geography teacher's pedagogical approach.

In understanding the divergences and commonalities in the representations of geography across different national settings, the case of Singapore is examined through the notion of politicisation of school curricula to meet the needs of "significant power groups". In particular, the development of school geography in Singapore and its response to changes in the education system are discussed, followed by an analysis of its development in relation to changes in academic geography. This is followed by a discussion on the place of school geography in responding to social and cultural concerns. Through content analyses of syllabus documents and secondary data, this article examines the role of each of the significant power groups in academic geography and the state and how they have shaped Singapore's school geography curriculum. While Singapore's school geography has been very responsive to changing educational processes, social demands and, to some extent, the development in academic geography, this has come at a price where the subject is now under threat from falling student intakes and what could be described as an abridged geography. The author argues that while responsiveness is a key factor to ensure the continued existence of the subject, stakeholders should not lose sight of a holistic understanding of geography as a discipline of study.

Reflecting on a personal journey as a geography student, an academic, an educator and a teacher trainer, the article provides a critical narrative of the state of school geography in Singapore and argues that its development has remained relevant to the changing issues at a global level. Using personal reflections and document analyses, school geography is traced from the primary school to tertiary levels, covering aspects of curriculum, teacher education and assessment. A specific example of education for climate change is used to examine if school geography in Singapore is indeed relevant to engaging global issues. The school geography curriculum can be designed to imbue our learners with the awareness, knowledge, skills, attitudes, evaluation ability and participation required to discourse and engage environmental concerns such as climate change. It is only through this change to the climate in teaching and learning geography that there is hope to mitigate climate change and other global concerns.

Geographical inquiry involves collecting, using and making sense of the data to investigate some geographical phenomena. With the increasing number of mobile devices equipped with Internet access capabilities, there is a wide scope for using it in field inquiry where learning can take place in the form of social interactions between team members while performing a common task. The authors examine the use of MobiTOP (Mobile Tagging of Objects and People), a geospatial digital library system which allows users to contribute and share multimedia annotations via mobile devices, within a geographical field inquiry. A key feature of MobiTOP that is well suited for collaborative learning is that annotations are hierarchical, allowing annotations to be annotated by other users to an arbitrary depth. A group of student and teachers involved in an inquiry-based learning activity in geography was instructed to identify rock types and associated landforms by collaborating with each other using the MobiTOP system. A method combining several data collection methods was used. Four main findings on the affordances of the mobile phone, the need for specialized training in using the application with the mobile phone, design considerations of the application and the authentic context of learning with fieldwork are reported. A discussion on the implication of these findings and how mobile technology may be used for geographical field learning are also included in this paper. (Contains 6 figures and 3 tables.)