This study draws on the findings from a STEM education project to examine Hong Kong in-service primary school teachers’ perceived challenges in implementing STEM education, the support they received in STEM teacher professional development (STEM TPD), and their needs for future STEM TPD. The study engaged teacher professional development through a school-university partnership and adopted a practitioner research approach that aimed at enhancing primary school teachers’ professional capacity of designing STEM activities relevant to the Hong Kong curriculum, with an emphasis on the learning of crosscutting concepts and inquiry-based teaching. STEM TPD is aimed at collaborative curriculum development as an opportunity to foster active learning through co-creating curriculum materials among teachers and university facilitators. Twelve primary school teachers from various subject teaching backgrounds were interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to collect the teachers’ experiences with the STEM TPD and their views on the integration of cross-cutting concepts in designing STEM lessons. Findings of the study revealed teachers' perceived challenges during the preparation and teaching phases related to STEM instruction and lesson planning, limited resources, and other concerns embedded in broader contextual situations. While teachers reported to have received different types of support from the STEM TPD relating to the pedagogical knowledge of STEM, future directions for STEM TPD were expressed in relation to content components of STEM TPD, opportunities for authentic learning and first-hand experiences, and coherence. Finally, this chapter discusses areas that need to be resolved before a further enhancement in terms of quality and quantity of STEM lessons could be expected. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

In many disciplines of STEM education, online experiments (OEs), commonly called remote-controlled experiments, become an emerging practice in technology-enhanced learning because of their many merits perceived in educational research. We recently formulated an innovative, low-cost, and open-source approach to developing new OEs rapidly. It won a gold medal and a special prize in an international innovation and invention competition in 2018. Using this new approach, teachers and students can easily access OEs with a lightweight web browser using any hardware and any operating system without installing additional software or apps. They can observe and/or control the experiments and collect authentic data (over a very short or long time) for further analysis by plotting graphs and/or conducting calculations to obtain important results. Some well-accepted instructional approaches or pedagogies have been integrated into online science/STEM experiments, which can also be aligned with school-based curricula to provide self-contained courseware for students’ online self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we will focus on whether OEs could really and effectively provide the essential elements of experimental learning to ‘school students’ as expected in traditional laboratory work. From our pilot implementation in four Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland China (CHINA) secondary schools with a total of 172 participants, we explored the OE experiences of different experiments and cognitive performance among students from different regions and genders using the conventional mixed methods research and design-based research. Students’ feedback and suggestions for improvement of the OEs were also analysed together with some specific implications for science/STEM education. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

This study investigates Hong Kong primary science teachers' understandings of inquiry learning, perceived difficulties in implementing inquiry learning, as well as their current practices of and resistance to using online resources, in order to identify their needs and propose suggestions to address these needs. An online survey has been used to collect data from the primary science teachers taking part in a professional development course. Simple descriptive analyses of the data show that although the teachers' conceptions of inquiry learning seem to match well with the idea of inquiry learning in general, their misconceptions and high level of perceived difficulties in implementing inquiry learning warrant our attention. As for teachers' use of online resources, it is found that traditional Web 1.0 resources are more commonly used, and when these online resources are used, teachers take the more dominant role in using them to support lecturing and explaining. Moreover, some associations between inquiry practices and use of online resources are observed. Accordingly, ways to overcome challenges in implementing inquiry learning and using online resources for the teaching and learning of science are discussed.
[Copyright of Education 3-13 is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2012.710640]

We envisage a model of pulling the concept of using the Internet for education into real practice in school in which the student-teachers play the key role for the successful implementation. In order to achieve the target depicted in this model, a large scale teaching development project is being carried out to develop subjec-based courseware to give student-teachers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) intensive exposure to some interactive hypermedia resources for self-learning on the Internet.

This short paper reports the rationales and features of a web-based project which aims to create a comprehensive online platform to help the student-teachers to develop confidence and skills for the effective teaching of various science topics in schools through learning from and sharing with the peers. This online platform not only contains a data bank of video clips on some student-teachers' exemplary teaching performance in a local educational context but also provides a combination of synchronous or asynchronous communication channels for participants to share ideas and feelings. The merits of using this website for training science teachers will be discussed together with some initial findings on the evaluation of this project.

This paper argues with evidence that conditions for teacher professional development can be enhanced for mentor teachers through a Learning Centre (LC) project which has been introduced in Hong Kong as a collaborative project between the government, a primary school, a secondary school, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education. The LC teachers perform the role of mentor teachers to enhance professional development of other teachers through web-based workshops or forums, face-to-face teacher education workshops, and school-based support. While the LC teachers are expected to gain professional development themselves as mentors, as suggested in the literature, the environment that may enhance their own professional development is not clear. Using structured interviews, the authors identified the professional development environment that the LC teachers experienced. The paper concludes with recommendations for environmental conditions enhancing the professional development of teachers in schools and conditions to support LC teachers.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2010.504018]

This paper reports part of the findings from a project called, "Schools Around the World" which aims to offer opportunities for professional development among teachers participating in the project. Through the exchange of professional experiences between local teachers and teachers from other countries in the world, the development of a standard for students' achievement in science both locally and with reference to an international standard will be achieved. This project is originated from Schools Around the World Project (SAW) which was initiated in the United States by an education research foundation, Council for Basic Education (CBE). Apart from Hong Kong and the United States, there are seven other participating countries including Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Portugal. It marks an innovative approach with its emphasis on teacher professional development. Instead of using curricular documents, textbooks or an one-off testing to find out standard of student achievement, SAW defines standard by engaging teachers in professional discussion about the nature of excellence and the methods of teaching. The excellence at issue is excellent student work. The project also aims to build up a professional network of teachers internationally such that teachers can work together to develop not only the local set of standards but also an international standard for students. Science which warrants much attention from the local educators has been designated as the first subject focus of the SAW project. This paper looks into the initial views of primary teachers about student work, assessment in science learning and the assessment of science projects at the primary level. The present study is now at the pilot stage, hence both the findings presented in this paper and the overall results of the pilot study provide important background information to the project in supporting the professional development of the teachers. Moreover,