The trend to extend science education to include STEM education in the US in the recent decade also takes place in many other countries in the world. In Hong Kong, the future development in education proposed in the Policy Address 2015 included: “The Education Bureau will renew and enrich the curricula and learning activities of Science, Technology and Mathematics, and enhance the training of teachers, thereby allowing primary and secondary pupils to fully unleash their potential in innovation (item 152).” However, the integration of science with technology, mathematics and engineering is still to be established and further research along this line is necessary. Therefore, this study attempts to analyze the written reports in an inquiry project event for a better understanding of STEM activities demonstrated by the primary students. The primary students’ inquiry project reports were chosen from those 140 teams (with 4-5 members in a team) with 1000 primary students who were aged 10-12 participated in the 2015 “Innovations in Science and Environment Studies” event in Hong Kong. Under the main theme of “Go Green at Home”, the participating teams had to present the processes and results of their inquiry projects and to submit a written report which recorded their ideas, methodology and inquiry processes and results. 10 project reports were randomly chosen from each group of outstanding, merit and consolation projects with a total of 30 projects being analyzed. Content analysis was first conducted to code STEM activities demonstrated in each project report. The coded data were then changed into numerical data for quantitative analysis. The results showed that more engineering and science activities were adopted than technology and mathematics activities in the inquiry projects. Outstanding group conducted more STEM activities than the merit and consolation groups and significant group differences existed in science and mathematics activities. Furthermore, science activities

This study explored two under-researched areas on students' attitudes towards science, that is, the structural models representing these attitudes and the role played by school bands in moderating the gender differences in such attitudes. The participants were 360 ninth graders in Hong Kong from 3 school bands. The structural equation modelling method was adopted to compare four hypothetical models for students' attitudes towards science. Results reflect that (i) the data supported the three-factor structure of the behavioural domain of students' attitudes towards science; (ii) the four lower level dimensions of the attitudes towards science (i.e. value of science to society, self-concept in science, anxiety towards science and enjoyment of science) could be further integrated into broader categories; (iii) male students demonstrated significantly more positive attitudes towards science in five dimensions (i.e. self-concept in science, enjoyment in science, learning science in and outside the classroom and future participation) and (iv) school bands played a prominent moderating role in gender differences in students' attitudes towards science. Implications for studying and developing students' attitudes towards science are discussed in the paper.

As digital technology is increasingly a part of all sectors of society, educational approaches must be developed in order to nurture students’ ability to see the world through a computational lens. One way to achieve this goal is to promote Computational Thinking (CT) for young learners. The CoolThink@JC project is a four-year curriculum pilot designed to integrate CT into Hong Kong upper-primary level schools. The CoolThink framework for curriculum development is structured around computational concepts, practices and perspectives adapted from the framework of Brennan and Resnick (2012). This adapted framework motivated the choice of learning activities for CoolThink. This paper focuses on one aspect of that framework, namely computational practices. Here, we describe how activities in the CoolThink curriculum can promote the computational practices highlighted by the framework.
[Copyright © 2017 The Hong Kong Jockey Club.]

This study adopted a researcher-generated framework to analyze STEM activities demonstrated in primary students' science projects in an annual extracurricular event held in Hong Kong. Ten students' project reports were randomly selected from each of the three groups of 24 outstanding, 45 merit, and 68 consolation awarded projects. Content analysis was conducted to code the activities in each project. The coded information was then changed into numerical data for quantitative analysis. The results showed that, in general, more engineering and science activities than technology and mathematics activities were adopted by the primary students in their projects. More projects with the Outstanding Award conducted STEM activities than those projects with Merit and Consolation Awards, and significant group differences existed in the science and mathematics activities. Besides, science activities significantly positively related to engineering and mathematics activities. Furthermore, STEM-related content knowledge of discipline core ideas and crosscutting concepts were reported. This study sheds light on the pattern of STEM activities in students' science projects, and has implications for promoting STEM integration in primary education.
[Copyright © 2017 Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan.]

Although the goal of developing school students’ understanding of nature of science (NOS) has long been advocated, little is known about how science teachers, a kind of major stakeholder in NOS instruction, perceive the values of teaching NOS. Through semi-structured interviews, this study investigated the views of 15 Hong Kong in-service teachers toward the values of teaching NOS. The values of teaching NOS as perceived by the teachers fall into two types. The first type is related to students’ learning of science in the classroom and involves (i) facilitating the study of subject knowledge, (ii) increasing the interest in learning science, (iii) aiding the conduct of scientific inquiry, (iv)meeting the needs of public examination, and (v) fulfilling the inherent requirement of scientific learning. The second type goes beyond learning science and includes (i) developing thinking abilities, (ii) cultivating scientific ethos, and (iii) supporting the participation in public decisions on socioscientific issues. Although rich relationships were perceived by these teachers between NOS instruction and students’ learning of science, few values were stated from broad social and cultural perspectives. Suggestions are made on designing programs to prepare teachers for teaching NOS.

This paper, through discussion of a teaching intervention at two secondary schools in Hong Kong, demonstrates the learning advancement brought about by group work and dissects the facilitating role of teachers in collaborative discussions. One-hundred and fifty-two Secondary Two (Grade 8) students were divided into three pedagogical groups, namely "whole-class teaching", "self-directed group work" and "teacher-supported group work"groups, and engaged in peer-review, team debate, group presentation and reflection tasks related to a junior secondary science topic (i.e. current electricity). Pre- and post-tests were performed to evaluate students' scientific conceptions, alongside collected written responses and audio-recorded discussions. The results indicate that students achieved greater cognitive growth when they engaged in cooperative learning activities, the interactive and multi-sided argumentative nature of which is considered to apply particularly well to science education and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development framework. Group work learning is also found to be most effective when teachers play a role in navigating students during the joint construction of conceptual knowledge.
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