School-based assessment of science students' practical skills has two important roles—as a complement to written papers in public examinations and as a catalyst for enriching the science curriculum in schools. This article describes a quantitative study of the concerns chemistry and biology teachers experience as they engage in the process of implementation of a school-based assessment scheme for practical work. A 23-item questionnaire was developed to measure five categories of teacher concern: evaluation, information, management, consequence and refocusing. The nature of each category of teacher concern is discussed in relation to innovation adoption and implementation. Data were collected from 400 chemistry and 412 biology teachers in Hong Kong. Teachers' information and management concerns lessened in intensity when they became experienced users of a school-based assessment scheme. However, teaching experience alone could not motivate teachers to think more about the impact of school-based assessment on student learning, their professional development in student assessment and the possible refinements in their school-based assessment scheme. Concerns-based interventions are suggested to help teachers grow professionally.
[Copyright of Research in Science & Technological Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0263514042000290877]

Over the past few years, curriculum innovation has been regarded as an essential strategy for educational reform throughout the era of educational change. Because of the changing nature of the knowledge age, students need to develop ways of dealing with complex issues and problems that require different kinds of skills and knowledge they have ever learned. Given the advancement of information and communications technologies (ICT), a number of cases of building learning communities in classrooms have been developed in recent years. Realizing the impact of this new learning culture, six primary schools in Hong Kong participated in the implementation of building learning communities through science project works. During the project, students from different schools engaged in the discussion and knowledge construction using a computer mediated communication (CMC) platform called Knowledge Forum. The aim of this case study is to explore the role of ICT in building learning communities and the conditions are essential to building learning communities from the different ways that students and teachers experienced the processes of community and knowledge construction using Knowledge Forum. Through the analysis of the interviews of students and teachers, conditions that support learning community building were emerged in three major themes, namely; conceptions of learning, knowledge construction processes, and development of social processes.
[Copyright of Educational Media International is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0952398032000092198]

The development and evaluation of science students' metacognition, learning processes and self-efficacy are important for improving science education. This paper reports on the development of an empirical self-report instrument for providing a measure of students' metacognition, self-efficacy and constructivist science learning processes. A review of the range of literature related to metacognition, self-regulation and constructivist learning processes resulted in the development of an initial bilingual (English and traditional Chinese) instrument composed of 72 items. This instrument was completed by 465 Hong Kong high school students. The data collected were subjected to exploratory factor analysis and Rasch analysis. The subsequent refinement process resulted in a final version of the Self-Efficacy and Metacognition Learning Inventory—Science (SEMLI-S) consisting of 30 items that can be used for either analysing and focusing on any or all of its dimensions or for assigning scores to individuals that enable comparison between them in relation to their metacognitive science learning orientations.
[Copyright of International Journal of Science Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500690701482493]

Hong Kong students outperform their counterparts in most other countries in mathematics in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study Repeat (TIMSS-R) project, while their science performance is marginally above the international average. In order to probe below the surface of these achievement results, secondary analysis of the TIMSS-R Hong Kong data was performed to identify factors that affect student achievement. Results of the secondary analysis relating to curriculum provision, teacher characteristics, and classroom conditions and climate are reported in this paper. Based on the results, some recommendations are proposed to meet the need for quality education in the new era.
[Copyright of Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics, & Technology Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02783190009554009 ]

此報告描述1980年試行小學科學課的概況和課程綱要的發展過程。為數達300位來自80間小學的教師參與該項試教計劃。報告總結以及檢討推行時常見的困難，並提出如何改善教學環境設備和考查科學學習成果。