Early Childhood Development and Education in Singapore

Professor Oon-Seng Tan is Director of the Centre for Research in Child Development at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore. He is an inaugural Chen Yidan Visiting Global Fellow of Harvard University. He is also a Fellow of the International Academy of Education. Prof Tan was previously Director of NIE. He was President of the Educational Research Association of Singapore and President of the APERA. Professor Tan has been an Expert Panel member of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Fund of Singapore. He is Editor-in-Chief of Educational Research for Policy & Practice (Springer) and Lead-Editor of Asia Pacific Journal of Education (Routledge).  Prof Tan's areas of research include teacher education, psychology and learning. He has authored/edited more than 20 books and over 150 scholarly articles/chapters in these fields. He has delivered keynote addresses globally including the National Science Foundation EHR Distinguished Lecture, AERA Annual Meetings presidential sessions, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science international symposium, and international education ministers’ summits.

Professor Kenneth Poon is Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. He also serves concurrently as Associate Dean, Education Research and co-Director of the Centre for Research in Child Development. With over twenty years of experience working with individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families, his research focuses on the developmental psychopathology of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities as well as children at risk. In his research, he seeks to identify the factors which are associated with the risk and resilience of such children, and to inform practice with this research. Aligned with his experience, Kenneth adopts a lifespan and ecological approach in framing research, which has focused largely on individuals with autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disabilities,as well as quality of life. 

Dr. Beth A. O’Brien is Principal Research Scientist and Head of Early and Middle Childhood Research at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Her research focuses on reading development from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, where cognitive models provide a framework to investigate processes for acquiring literacy, and neuroscience methods supplement these models by specifying the neural constraints of such learning mechanisms. Her work includes longitudinal studies of reading and biliteracy development, intervention studies with struggling learners, and the development of assessment tools. She is involved in ongoing projects investigating neural networks for bilingual readers and artificial neural network simulations of individual differences in reading development.