Participating in Schools Around the World Project (SAW) provides local participating primary and secondary teachers a good opportunity to look into their current teaching practices. Science has been taken as the first investigation subject, which is an area that demands more attention in Hong Kong. Joining the SAW project, it may improve and enhance the quality of Hong Kong science education by promoting and encouraging professional development of the participating teachers through local and international sharing and discussion on the collected samples of student work in science with the aid of technology advancement. This paper focuses on how student work and technology can act as a means to achieve this aim.
[Copyright © 2000 HKIEd APFSLT.]

Noting that there are few studies conducted in Hong Kong to clarify the critical issues of the teaching of science process skills at the primary schooling level, the author made an effort to investigate primary teachers’ perceptions concerning the teaching of the skills. A total of 159 General Studies (GS) teachers in 30 primary schools responded to a questionnaire survey. The analysis shows that, first, 68.6% of GS teachers had not studied science at the matriculation level and in post-secondary courses, with many of them had had studied science merely up to F.3 level. Second, secondary science education is a crucial training in building up primary teachers’ self-perceived ability in teaching science process skills. And third, the teachers themselves were deficient in such high-level science process skills as inferring, predicting, formulating hypotheses, and investigating. Implications are discussed.
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This article presents information related to "The Science & Technology Education Conference," (STEC) that is a biennial event held in late June or early July at The Hong Kong Institute of Education. Started in 1996 as a small symposium for teacher educators and members of the Education Department (now Education and Manpower Bureau), it has since grown into a full two-day conference with keynote speakers, paper presentations, demonstrations and workshops. The conference focuses on primary and secondary science teaching as well as subjects relating to the discipline of design & technology (D&T).
[Copyright © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.]

Though recent curriculum reform of Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan all include creativity as one of their major learning objectives, however, creativity-enhancing teaching methods are seldom implemented in real classroom practice. This study presents a systematic method for designing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in traditional educational context, like Hong Kong. It suggests a comprehensive set of learning objectives, strategies for generating new activity designs, and rationales for selecting activities, and more than 20 different kinds of learning activities that are simple and easy to be infused into normal Physics lessons. To understand teachers’ and students’ opinions on these activities, they were tried-out in two secondary classes, and were introduced to 120 senior Physics teachers of Hong Kong. On the whole, teachers and students gave positive feedback and support the usefulness and suitability of this set of instructional designs. Results also revealed some obstacles in fostering creativity of Hong Kong students and some shortcomings of these activity designs.
[Copyright © 2004 HKIEd APFSLT.]

This article explores pupils’ attitudes toward technology relative to academic banding as well as gender and other variables. Over 2,800 students in 22 schools completed questionnaires. Results indicated that students in lower band schools were more likely than students in higher band schools to participate in Design and Technology (D&T) programs. Moreover, many more students had computers in their homes than did when a similar study was conducted in 1997 (Volk & Yip, 1999). The implications of this study relate to improving the type of program that students in lower bands receive and encouraging positive attitudes toward technology regardless of which school a student attends.
[Copyright © 2004 International Vocational Education and Training Association.]

Under the impetus of the Hong Kong education reform, curriculum development has brought a whole new range of perspectives with an emphasis on "Learning to Learn". Schools are encouraged to formulate their own curriculum development plan according to their individual situation and readiness. (Curriculum Development Council, 2001a). This School-Based Science Curriculum Development (SBSCD) project was established to echo the need for professional guidance and support in this area, with a focus in science education. The SBSCD project is one of the initiatives under the Hong Kong Schools Around the World (HKSAW) project funded by the Quality Education Fund. The benefits of mobilizing the resources from the Schools Around the World project in the SBSCD project is explained in the paper. This project, with a participation of seven schools, was designed for one academic term and has adopted an interactive approach embedded within three main phases: planning, implementation and evaluation. The aim of this short-term project is to reveal a naturalistic model of SBSCD that may lead the participating schools to realize their future science curriculum directions. Instruments were developed to obtain data on the school's existing situation as relevant to the SBSCD implementation, to investigate factors affecting the interaction between the schools and the HKSAW Curriculum Development Team, and to find out teachers' awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of their own teaching after the SBSCD. This paper serves as a preliminary report of this case study. Therefore, its main purpose is not to report on empirical findings, but rather to define the factors for the above study areas and to provide an initial reference on the process of implementation for school practitioners.
[Copyright © 2002 HKIEd APFSLT.]

In this paper, an excerpt of teacher–student interaction in an EFL junior secondary science classroom in Hong Kong is analysed using the conversation analytic method of sequential analysis. The fine-grained analysis reveals that in the teacher's effort to engage her students in the co-construction of a scientific proof, the students' familiar everyday discourses (e.g. students' examples and experiences as expressed in their familiar language) need to be allowed to play a significant role. It also shows how translanguaging can be well-coordinated with multimodal practices (using blackboard drawings, gestures) to facilitate students' meaning-making in the inquiry-based teacher–student dialogue.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.988113]

In Hong Kong, the educational reform launched by the Education Bureau since year 2000 encouraged primary schools to use the inquiry approach in the teaching of science and technology related topics in General Studies. It is believed that this approach is a student-centred approach which helps students to integrate generic skills, knowledge and values in the learning of General Studies. However, primary school teachers in Hong Kong do not commonly practice the inquiry approach in the teaching of General Studies because they found this approach time consuming and difficult to manage with the limited time of each lesson. Students hence have few opportunities of trying out experiments and science concepts are usually learned by rote without real understanding. This paper illustrates how a group of teachers in a primary school, collaborated with the researchers from The Hong Kong Institute of Education, used the Learning Study approach in planning and teaching a Primary 4 General Studies topic about "Light and shadow". During the study, the team found that one of the problems of students was that they were only able to repeat the statement "Light travels in a straight line" but could not apply the concept to explain daily life phenomena, such as the formation of a shadow. In this study, the research team identified an important object of learning which was omitted in the textbook. In the lessons, the inquiry approach was used, which provided opportunities for students to investigate the concept of "Light travels in a straight line". By improving the design and the enactment of the Variation pattern in different teaching cycles, a more effective lesson design was achieved, resulting in better student learning outcomes as shown by the pre and post student interviews and test results of the Learning Study.

本文分析了就讀香港教育學院教師教育證書課程部份學員的經驗。為培育學員教授科學課題，教師教育課程引入了一個專為教授科學課題而設的單元，討論好幾種科學教學方法，尤其是跟建構主義學習觀相符的教授方式。本研究旨在探討學員在三個階段的發展情況，分別為：學習單元前、完成單元後和實習期過後三階段。學員需在每個階段接受訪問，而他們對教授科學課題的看法、作為學校教師的感受以及個人學習教學技巧的經驗等都被收集以作分析之用。綜合資料所得，本文將進一步總結影響學員學習發展的因素。
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

現有的小學數學課程綱要 (1983) 和提議中的新修訂課程綱要 (2001) 都把「引起兒童對數學學習的興趣」列為課程目標的第一點。作者試圖在這篇文章中討論個課程綱要在內容上如何配合這個課程目標。並且討論如何由這些數學內容和教學方法達到引起兒童學習數學的目的。 香港小學數學課程，無論是1983年的板本抑或是2001年的修訂課程初稿，「引起兒童對數學學習的興趣」列為課程目標的第一點，都把內容分為5個範圍，它們是數、圖形與空間、度量、數據處理和代數。單從內容上來說，它們可以是很中性，能否引起兒童學習數學的興趣，似乎依賴老師的教學方法能否把單調的內容教得生動有趣，例如，有些老師利用比賽的形式和獎品的鼓勵，把一課四則計算變數成人人參與的數學計算課，而且興高采烈 (請先不要討論外在動機和內在動機的問題)。例如，利用數學探究的方式，研究利用1,9,9,8這4個數字，四則運算和括號去組成結果等於0,1,2,…,20的數式。這個過程可以令學生在做四則計算題時更有趣味。有經驗的老師應該可以利用一些趣味數學課題，穿插在既定的課程內，提高數學學習的興趣。 不過，老師有多能耐，仍然要從課程中尋找教材和由課程指導設計教學活動，故此，數學課程的編排，內容的取捨和相互關係，以及課程的取向，都影響老師的教學和目標的配合。假若課程取向和內容根本不能發展學生的興趣，則老師再努力亦會有巧婦難為無米之的感覺。 課程內容寫得再好亦要看看整體的教育配合，假若小學教育工作者都以中學派位作為取向，則課程寫得再好，在考試導向下，很難達成課程希望的目標。其次是老師的培訓，很多人誤以為教授小學數學不必具備太多的中文學科知識，直到大家驚覺到語文水平的低落，才亡羊補牢，提出多種辦法來挽救。其實類似情形亦同樣發生在數學科，不過大家的注意力都放在語文科身上，忽略了數學老師的培訓問題。