As a final year student pursuing a Bachelor of Psychology at James Cook University Singapore, Ms Rebecca Yeo had her eye on a career in neuropsychology.
Moved by their struggle, she decided to delve deeper into special needs education and use the knowledge from her degree to help students with dyslexia learn better. She is also the programme manager for mathematics, and oversees programme and curriculum development, research, student profiling and conducting training sessions for teachers.
Ms Yeo recalls a student who was transferred to her class. His former teachers gave her feedback that he was stubborn and would rather read than do maths. They had a difficult time trying to get him to enter their maths classroom and to complete their tasks. After working with him for a few months, he started showing up for classes on his own, sometimes even before the lesson began. His attention span also improved from 20 minutes to 40 minutes. His grades improved as well, and he became a much happier child, Ms Yeo says.Applying knowledge In her nine years at DAS, Ms Yeo has many more stories to share about students who have overcome their learning challenges.
Having grown in her roles at DAS, Ms Yeo still continues to use some of the theories she learnt during her JCU days to develop new teaching strategies. One example is Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory.