Learning Study, in the form of action research, provides a platform for school-based teacher professional development in Hong Kong. In each Learning Study, teachers of a certain subject in a school work collaboratively with researchers from the Hong Kong Institute of Education to plan and teach a lesson, aiming to achieve some important goals and/or to solve some learning problems in the curriculum of that subject. This presentation is about a Secondary 2 science Learning Study case on the topic “Action and Reaction”. Findings from the pilot interview indicated that the students had quite a lot of misconceptions about “forces” and they had few chances to make scientific reasoning in their science lessons. The object of learning of this Learning Study case was to infer the relationship between action and reaction based on the observations from some linear motion experiments. The presentation reports the whole process in conducting the Learning Study, including the identification of learning difficulties, planning and teaching of the lesson, evaluation of the learning outcomes and reflections from the teachers.

It has been estimated that there are globally over 20 million people using various features of the Internet. In particular, the World Wide Web(WWW) is developing very rapidly, especially for business application and it consists of interlinked hypermedia documents for retrieving and displaying information in form of text, pictures, audio, video and even interactive simulation. From an educator' s point of view, there are three main advantageous features of the WWW that can make it very special for educational usage: First, the teaching materials in hypermedia form are accessible around the world through networked personal computers and so the temporal and spatial constraint of classroom teaching are removed. Second, the multimedia features of the WWW documents (represented by Hypertext Markup Language, HTML) are well-known to be effective for presentation/ transmission of ideas and factual information. Third, the hyperlinkage of WWW documents provides not only links (i.e. WWW addresses or locations) to other documents as instantaneously accessible references but also a mode of nonlinear learning which resembles the association operation of human mind. However, the concept of teaching through the Internet has rarely been put into practice in the sub-degree level according to our knowledge in the Science discipline. Therefore, we have employed a simple model to establish a WWW home-page (located at http://www.hkstar.com/~hkiedsci) of a self-learning package on Introductory Digital Electronics for our HKIEd Science students enrolled in various types and modes of courses as well as for those AS/AL Physics students in Hong Kong. Apart from some qualitative feedback obtained from email, we have issued an evaluation questionnaire to every science student concerned to collect his/her suggestions for improvement of the contents of the topic and the design of the home-page and to reflect the student' s receptivity of learning through the Internet. The main results of our survey

For enabling the teachers to achieve the IT competence as required by the Hong Kong government for implementing the recent IT in education policy, we find that when it comes to the competent (or upper intermediate) level, a subject-based training approach is definitely more ideal in catering for the special needs of Science teachers whose subject disciplines are highly specialized in terms of content and pedagogy. The advocacy for a subject-based (or subject-specific) IT training course for Physics teachers is supported by some recent needs analysis. Based on those research findings and the content analysis on features peculiar to the Physics teaching and learning, we shall present an initial sketch on the scope of IT applications for Physics through a subject-based approach. Results from the questionnaire survey on the Physics teachers' perception of the training needs in various kinds of IT skills will also be given in this paper.

The contents of nature of science (NOS) in science curriculum have been changed in the past few decades. In the sixties, the contents were mainly about science process skills. Later, the tentative, replicable, probabilistic, humanistic, historic and empirical natures were included in the seventies and psychological and social factors were included in the eighties. In the recent science education reforms of many countries, students' adequate understandings of NOS were explicitly stated or required. In order to achieve similar educational goal in the current curriculum reform in Hong Kong, we must first develop a valid, reliable, practical and easy-to-analyse research instrument for large-scale probing of students' understanding and views of NOS. The present paper reports on how we have made use of 3 cases from history of physical science (to wit, biography of Galileo Galilei, Thomson and Rutherford's atomic models, and observation of "canali" in Mars) plus three other historical cases and issues from the biomedical field (to wit, Jenner's use of vaccination for immunization against smallpox, discovery of SARS virus in Hong Kong, and discovery of the mosquito's role in transmitting the malaria disease) to develop two new sets of questionnaire research tools. The major criticisms on past paper-and-pencil NOS questionnaire instruments had been properly considered and addressed during the design process. Subsequently, questionnaire surveys were administered to about 640 students at junior secondary level in 6 Hong Kong schools and about 450 science students at senior secondary level in another 6 schools in Hong Kong. Those surveyed data were triangulated with the group interviews of a few randomly selected students in each class. Some key findings on the students' attitudes and misconception towards NOS will be presented in this conference paper together with a brief discussion on their implication in science education.

In the Science Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), on e of our prominent research and teaching development areas is the application of information science and related technologies (which consist of scientific and 3D visualization, virtual reality, scientific computation, computer-simulated experiments, datalogging systems for computer-controlled/interfaced experiments as well as the conventional IT elements such as multimedia and Internet) in Science education. We have been applying our project output not only for teaching a thousand of Science or General Studies and non-Science elective student-teachers enrolled in various HKIEd sub-degree and degree level courses, but also for providing value-free knowledge to the public through the Internet (e.g. Hypermedia And Self-learning Centre with website http://www.ied.edu.hk/has) and some in-service teacher training programs. From a teacher educator’s point of view, we will share our expertise/experience in some practical and plausible applications of information science and related technologies for promoting quality teaching and effective learning through a subject-based or subject specific approach with particular reference to the Science education. We shall also discuss some feasible ways of training/upgrading the IT competence of school science teachers through a series of hands-on and minds-on workshops.

Comprehensive studies on the Hong Kong primary science curriculum are rare. This study is to fill the knowledge gap by examining the science curricula for all primary grade levels from the 1960s to 1990s in Hong Kong. Critical features related to the most important aspects of the intended curriculum are identified and compared, thereby identifying the trends of primary science curriculum development in local context. It is found that the area of learning related to science and technology will become indispensable in the new educational innovation.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This chapter focuses on teaching and learning science in Hong Kong primary classrooms. Two broad types of teaching strategies that are based on the most important variables in teaching strategies - teacher dominance in instruction and learners' amount of participation - are discussed. The findings from the analysis of teachers' teaching and pupils' learning of science provided insights for discussion. The issues of addressing teachers' professional development needs, encouraging active participation and bridging the gap between teachers' teaching and pupils' need were concluded. Future directions of work for on-going professional development and continuous work with teachers were suggested.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Considerable evidence has been accumulated in Hong Kong that Learning Study, as a form of action research collaboratively conducted by school teachers and researchers from Higher Educational Institutes, provides a comprehensive platform for school-based teacher professional development. Learning Study is grounded in the Variation Theory developed by Ference Marton. It involves an active collaboration between teachers and academic staff from the Hong Kong Institute of Education. In conducting a Learning Study, teachers, through a rigorous process, first select the topic, then work with the HEI staff to identify the worthwhile object of learning with its critical aspects and collectively design the lesson, which incorporates the application of three forms of variation (V1, V2 and V3). The lesson is taught, video taped and then analysed in a post-lesson conference. A revised plan for teaching the same lesson is then taught by a different member of the research team in his/her class. This process is repeated until all the teachers have taught the lesson to their classes.The Learning Study case will be evaluated and then presented by the teachers to the wider community as part of the dissemination process. This symposium will first provide an overview of Learning Study theory and practice model, then illustrate its actual implementation with several Learning Study cases. The third part discusses how Learning Study builds up an effectively comprehensive platform for classroom teachers to analyze the students' learning achievement, reflect upon their own teaching, develop learning communities and benefit their entire professional development.