Impacts of a STSE high school biology course on the scientific literacy of Hong Kong students

Compared to the traditional course, the STSE course of this study produced better learning outcomes in application of scientific concepts, scientific inquiry skills and STSE awareness, but showed no significant differences in recall of scientific concepts and attitudes toward science learning. These findings are in general consistent with the STSE literature except for the lack of positive impacts on students' attitudes (Aikenhead 2003).

But the result that the traditional class outperformed the STSE class in NOS understanding is unexpected. The teaching about NOS has involved many difficulties and issues, which are reviewed by Lederman (2007). One of the issues is that NOS instruction has to be explicit and reflective, but the STSE course has to address a number of other objectives so that it may have not given adequately “explicit” attention to the NOS aspects. However, this still cannot explain why the traditional class showed even better performance than the treatment class.

The study has shed light on how to further improve the scientific literacy of Hong Kong students through reforming the traditional science curriculum and instruction. A STSE approach as designed in this study is deemed feasible in the exam-driven contexts of Hong Kong in view of its effectiveness and efficiency in learning scientific concepts. The key principles of designing this STSE course, though not all justified by the data, would provide reference for STSE curriculum development:

STSE themes are used for organizing knowledge of a science discipline - category 4 of Aikenhead’ (1994) STS categories, which makes scientific concepts learned and applied in meaningful contexts.

A STSE course better puts more emphasis on the current of logical reasoning (Pedretti and Nazir 2010), which is more about rational decision making for socioscientific issues. As such, the STSE course can resonate with Liberal Study, a core subject newly introduced in Hong Kong in 2009. Too much emphasis on the moral, social and cultural aspects of SSIs may make the course resisted by science teachers and students under the highly exam oriented culture of Hong Kong.

STSE themes are carefully selected and constructed to ensure the coverage of curricular contents on the one hand, and minimize out-of-syllabus contents on the other hand. It is to make sure that the course is not regarded additional and irrelevant to examinations by teachers and students.

Scientific inquiry skills, STSE awareness and NOS understandings are extracted from the STSE contexts and explicitly targeted through a variety of learning activities. This makes the learning of these skills and understandings more holistic and contextual.

Instructional methods are principally direct teaching for scientific concepts so that the efficiency of content learning, in terms of instruction time, would not be severely compromised. The STSE approach had already used 50% more instruction time than the traditional class to give comparable learning outcomes on content learning. If a more student-centred approach is used, the STSE approach would take an even longer time to cover the same amount of content. But for other skills and values targeted by STSE education, more interactive, student-centered strategies are employed since didactic teaching is deemed not effective for these outcomes.

The instructional sequence is basically social issues-technology-science knowledge- technology-social issues so that the learning of science knowledge is contextualized on a need-to-know basis and elaborated through applications.

STSE approach, when following the above design principles, is even better than traditional teaching in the learning of scientific knowledge. The effectiveness of the STSE approach in concept learning hinges on the facts that science concepts are repeatedly learned and applied in varying contexts. This finding is important as it could alleviate to some extent the fears of teachers and parents that innovative teaching practices may compromise content learning and exam performances.

Some may argue that a STSE approach following the above design principles has given too much emphasis on scientific knowledge and skills, but not adequately addressed the values, cultures and morals inherent in the socioscientific issues. This is the tension between Vision I and II of scientific literacy (Roberts, 2007). The results of this study support that Visions I and II are not entirely incompatible: Students can learn scientific knowledge and skills in a robust manner (Vision I) even in the contexts of socioscientific issues where values, culture and personal opinions are addressed moderately (Vision II). These two aspects of scientific literacy are actually complementing to each other when students need to make informed decision in face of complex socioscientific issues.

In Hong Kong and other Asian countries, there are high expectations from students, parents and teachers for success in the highly competitive exams. Any curricular innovation has to meet these expectations in order to be well received. It is necessary for Hong Kong to develop an approach suited for its own context, because STSE education in different countries should give different priorities to different goals according to their own needs and circumstances (Aikenhead 2002). Besides, given the top science performance of Hong Kong students in PISA and TIMSS, it would be unwise to make drastic changes in the priorities of goals of existing science education. Rather, we should capitalize on our existing strengths to improve the quality of science education.

Nonetheless, the above conclusions are limited by the design and subjects of the study. The positive impact of the STSE course on concept learning may not happen on students of lower academic abilities since they tend to be more prone to the unsystematic content learning through STSE themes. On the contrary, these students may enjoy the class more due to its interactivity and real life contexts so that their attitudes towards science learning may get enhanced more appreciably. The short duration of the course also limits the development of some skills and attitudes. At last, the teacher factor is also crucial, since STSE education would require a teacher to undergo “paradigmatic” changes in their educational beliefs (Aikenhead 2002). Teacher beliefs and capabilities are possibly the greatest barriers for extensive use of STSE approach for science instruction in Hong Kong.