3.1 The Pilot Study

The pilot study was conducted in Yishun Town Secondary School.  A total of thirty-nine students (twenty-five females and fourteen males) were involved.  The pilot was conducted between January and March 2004, at five different neighbourhoods in Singapore, namely Holland Village, Little India, Singapore Expo, Sembawang Hills and Little Guilin.  The conduct of the pilot study went very smoothly and established that the planned timeframes for each component of the design was workable, and that the component tasks themselves were pitched at a level sufficiently challenging to the students.  The main refinement made between the conduct of the pilot and main studies was to incorporate more thorough field-tasks briefings on the bus journey to the field-sites, rather than to attempt the briefing at the sites themselves.  The latter was occasionally not a satisfactory strategy because students tended to be distracted once they reached the site.

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