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

In sum, we interviewed a total of 11 curriculum planners and 45 school teachers, and collected questionnaire survey data from over 400 school science teachers before the implementation of the NSS science curricula in Hong Kong. Science teachers’ understanding of the teaching methods, SBA, and public examination in their respective subjects were generally satisfactory. However, teachers showed a significantly lower level of content knowledge understanding toward certain electives. Furthermore, schools or teachers would choose the electives for the science subjects, and the choices are mostly constrained by the expertise of teachers, their tendency to adhere to past practices, and the limitation of resources instead of student interest. Under the pressure from a single public examination, tackling public examination would be the most significant consideration in choosing electives. Therefore, the government’s rationale for broadening students’ learning experiences and catering for individual differences by offering electives within science subjects is apparently difficult to achieve unless additional resources are allocated to schools to purchase expensive equipment, and more in-service professional development courses are offered to enrich the subject knowledge of science teachers in those electives.

Traditional exposition and experiments/scientific inquiries activities would remain the two most highly adopted pedagogies among science teachers in NSS. However, the deductive approach to verifying theories instead of the inductive approach would be used because most of the science teachers rely on cookbook-style experimental workbooks developed by publishers. Given the limited time and resources, teachers would focus on drilling examination techniques rather than developing inquiry teaching materials. As a result, there would be no significant changes in pedagogy. Therefore, various innovative teaching methods (e.g., Frost, 2010; Ross, Lakin, and McKechine, 2010; Yeung, 2002) and technology-enhanced learning or computer-mediated experiments should be more widely incorporated into the teaching and learning of various science subjects.

As to the progression of the curriculum, teachers were aware of the extra cognitive demand placed on students to learn a topic at one time instead of following a spiral curriculum as in the old 2 + 2 (i.e., S4-5 Cert Level + S6-7 A-Level) curriculum. Being consistent with the current view on scientific literacy (AAAS, 1990; Millar, 2006), the respondents contemplated the building of a solid foundation in junior students to facilitate their transition from junior to senior science in different ways, including teaching separate science subjects in Secondary Three, and incorporating inquiry-based learning in junior forms. For the past few years, the EDB has funded some local tertiary teacher education institutions to provide this type of on-site school-based support to the junior and senior secondary forms in a number of secondary schools for the preparation of the NSS Liberal Studies subject. A similar kind of support should be extended to the science KLA, particularly for the NSS Integrated Science subject (CDC and HKEAA, 2007d), for which no textbook was released by any commercial publisher.

Nearly all respondents were greatly concerned about the increased diversity of students in terms of their ability and interest in learning science at senior levels. This problem could be tackled through a variety of means, with the most popular ones being conducting after-school supplementary classes and remedial classes for the less able students. As a final resort, teachers seemed to be ready to allow students to switch to the Combined Science subject, or even drop the subject if they experience too great a difficulty in mastering the subject concerned.

To tackle the manpower problem in implementing SBA, technicians will play an important role in deploying an investigative study of SBA across three science subjects. Some schools might invite technicians to guide or supervise an investigative study, and this might lead to other issues such as whether technicians have received sufficient training in supervising scientific projects, share the same rationale for developing students’ generic skills, and possess appropriate attitudes toward science and accountability. Some science teachers might also face the problem of assessing non-practical elements in SBA because this is different from traditional paper-and-pen assessment and they have not had any similar experience before.

Finally, the findings from this study could be taken as a useful reference for comparison with future review or evaluation of the NSS science curricula after their initial implementation. As Hong Kong students have been ranked atop several famous international comparative studies in science and mathematics like TIMSS (IEA, 2011) and PISA (OECD PISA, 2011), further investigation of the impact of the NSS on students’ academic performance in science subjects will be an interesting topic of research in the science education field.