Chee-Kit Looi 吕赐杰
The full CV is downloadable LOOI-CV 6 Jan 2021
Professor, Learning Sciences & Assessment Academic Group Founding Head, Learning Sciences Lab
Head, Centre for Scalability, Translation and Commercialization (2011 - 2014)
Head, Centre of Excellence in Learning Innovation (2008 – 2012)
Chee Kit is Head of Learning Sciences Lab of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological Society, the first research centre devoted to the study of the sciences of learning in the Asia-Pacific region. He oversaw the research lab which comprised between 8 to 20 research scientists (at different points in time) who hold PhDs in learning sciences and related disciplines. He was the Head, Centre for Scalability, Translation and Commercialization from 2011-2014. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Learning at NTU.
Chee Kit’s research in education is characterized by producing outcomes, processes or artifacts that impact practice. An early completed project of his in NIE involved the design and development of digital mathematics manipulatives which have been made available to all secondary schools in Singapore.
He is the PI or co-PI of several research projects funded by the National Research Foundation, Singapore. His research has created significant inroads into transforming school practices: his work on rapid collaborative learning has created routine practices of collaborative work in ten primary and secondary schools. These schools have continued or plan to continue the innovations on their own initiatives. This work is cited in the 2010 US National Educational Technology Plan as a key example of technology-enabled innovation that has significant real impact in schools.
His research on seamless and mobile learning has made good progress toward creating a model of 1:1 computing in schools. His work created and transformed the complete curricula of Primary 3 and 4 science in Nan Chiau Primary School in Singapore so that they can harness the affordances of mobile devices for inquiry learning. Because of the good research outcomes, the school has decided to scale-up its 1:1 implementation to all of the Primary 3 and 4 classes since 2011 till now. In 2013, the school works with ten other schools in to scale-up the curricular innovation, supported by research into teacher professional development models, and sustainability and implementation issues. This research is remarkable in terms of reaching this stage of achieving sustainability and scalability.
Chee Kit’s early mobile learning projects are featured amongst 25 handheld learning products and research projects in the U.S. and abroad in the US-based Sesame Workshop’s 2009 report on “Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning.” Thus his work is part of a cool-headed overview of the potential of mobile technologies for children's learning, which ends with a proposal to the Obama government to adopt a "multi-sector action plan to transform mobile learning from a state of uneven and scattered innovation into a force for dynamic educational impact.” His mobile learning work is also cited in the US-based District Administration website which is widely read by US schools’ superintendents.
Over the years, Chee Kit has given keynote addresses in international conferences held in Chile, Spain, Sweden, United States of America, Finland, Australia, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, UAE, and Singapore. He was a member of the SingTel Customer Advisory Council for Education. He was an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Learning Sciences, and is currently an Associate Editor for the International Journal of AI & Education. He is an editorial member for the Journal of CAL, the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and Journal of Smart Learning Environments. He is Review Editor for Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Education, and the General Editor of series entitled Routledge Advances in the Learning Sciences.
As a member of the Core Expert Group, he participated in the work on developing the framework for assessing Collaborative Problem Solving in OECD PISA 2015. He sits in the International Advisory Board for Global framework for STEM education, Global STEM Alliance, The New York Academy of Sciences, 2015. He is special consultant to the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University.
Chee Kit is a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Society on Computers in Education. He is a founding member of the Global Chinese Society of Computers in Education, sits on its advisory board, as well as the advisory board of the Computers in Education journal published by Springer. He served as the President of the Global Chinese Society of Computers in Education from 2017 to 2019.