Curriculum reform and restructuring of senior secondary science education in Hong Kong: Teachers’ perceptions and implications

This study was a subset of a large research project, which aimed at the comprehensive investigation of the NSSC before its actual implementation in Hong Kong. The full project team involved nine independent investigators who were assigned to deal with the four core subjects of the NSSC (i.e., Chinese Language, English Language, Mathematics, and Liberal Studies), together with some academic subjects from Key Learning Areas (KLAs) of Personal, Social, and Humanities Education (Geography), and Science Education (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Integrated Science). Additionally, another investigator targeted at the school administrators and/or policy makers. The three science educators with expertise in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology formed a close collaborative team to develop the relevant research instrument to collect qualitative and quantitative data from curriculum planners and school teachers in the Science Education KLA. Based on a critical review of all NSS science curricula together with a detailed comparison with the previous curricula at the S4-5 and S6-7 levels (Lee, Lam, and Yeung, 2010), a set of semi-structured interview questions (see Appendix I) and guidelines were developed to collect qualitative data from the curriculum planners (see Table 1). Using the preliminary findings from the curriculum planner interviews, the research instrument was modified and refined to collect further qualitative data from the science teachers in schools, and four sets of similar questionnaires were developed for collecting quantitative data from teachers of the four science disciplines. Each questionnaire consists of 4 parts, namely Part I on educational system and curriculum, Part II on the NSSC Physics/Chemistry/Biology/Integrated Science, Part III on impression of NSSC and Part IV on personal particulars. For Part II, there are 12 key questions and around 80 items with minor differences as reflected by subject nature and some questions are given in Appendix II. To ensure the validity and reliability, each questionnaire instrument has undergone around five times of revision by the authors (who are subject experts with many years of experiences on training teachers) and by the project team in a number of research meetings. Specific reference or modification was also made from the initial work of the central team or other subjects. The questionnaires (with two sets per subject per school) for the nine NSSC subjects and for the school administration were sent to 120 secondary schools (about a quarter of the total number in Hong Kong) randomly selected for the survey. The relevant statistics for the questionnaire survey are reported in Table 1 below.

**Table 1.** Statistics on interviews conducted with curriculum planners and subject teachers/panel heads and questionnaire survey of subject teachers in various science disciplines
	Number of interviews with		Questionnaire survey:
Subject	curriculum planners	teachers/ panel heads*	Number of valid questionnaires received*	Valid response rate based on schools
Physics	3	11 (7)	97 (67)	55.8%
Chemistry	3	16 (10)	111 (74)	61.7%
Biology	2	15 (11)	108 (73)	60.8%
Integrated Science	3	3 (2)	44 (25)	24.2%

*Number of schools involved is given in parentheses.

Almost all the interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed into computer files; meanwhile, the survey data were analyzed by the SPSS (involving Student’s t-test, Levene’s test on homogeneity of variances, ANOVA and Welch’s test on equality of means for 3 or more items, and exploratory factor analysis) for comparison with all other NSSC subjects and among the science subjects only. We were aware that the quantitative data should be analyzed properly by the Rasch model or Item Response Theory (see, e.g., Bond and Fox, 2007; Liu and Boone, 2006). However, to simplify the presentation and interpretation of our findings, we put aside those findings as analyzed by the Rasch model. Furthermore, we need to exclude the Integrated Science subject because the validity and reliability of the limited data collected from the corresponding teachers could not be ensured at an acceptable level.