Science laboratory learning environments in junior secondary schools

Learning in the laboratory has long been regarded as an important component in science education. Laboratory activities provide students with first-hand experience in seeing how nature works. Laboratory is specially designed and equipped for science experiments, demonstrations and investigations in a safe environment. In a review article Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) reflected that despite of the common perception laboratory activities help students in learning science, researches had not revealed, with clear relationships, that learning in the laboratory was effective to develop students’ conceptual understanding and scientific thinking skills as well as to foster a positive attitude towards science. Laboratory should not only be a place to demonstrate the phenomena described in the textbooks and to verify principles and laws, but it should also be a place where students are given the opportunities to go through the processes of scientific inquiry on their own. Twenty years later, Hofstein and Lunetta (2003) did a similar review again. During that twenty-year period, reforms in science education had changed the content and the pedagogy of science learning and teaching.. The shift of emphasis towards learning science through inquiry took place in many places around the world (Abd-El-Khalick, et al, 2004). New research instruments and methodologies were also developed. At present, researchers are better equipped to study factors that affect learning in the laboratory.

The Hong Kong Junior Secondary Science Curriculum (JSSC) (CDC, 1998) has been implemented since 2000. The curriculum advocates that “the investigative approach, which involves students in defining problems, designing experiments to find solutions, carrying out practical work and interpreting the results, should be employed” (CDC, 1998, p.2). This curriculum emphasizes the use of experimental work for inquiry learning approach. Learning in laboratory may play an increasingly important role in promoting the paradigm shift in science learning, providing that the learning activities are designed with inquiry approach in mind, and students are given adequate opportunities to construct the concepts through metacognitive processes and interactions with their peers and teachers. To achieve meaningful learning outcomes in the laboratory, the learning environment should favour these processes to occur. However, the curriculum developed by the central curriculum agency may not be implemented in fidelity at the classroom level. From a number of case studies, Anderson (1996, 2002) had summarised the barriers and dilemma, for which teachers encountered in implementing new approaches in science teaching, into three dimensions, namely the technical dimension, the political dimension, and the cultural dimension. Thus a study of the laboratory learning environments may provide us a channel to understand to what extent the inquiry learning has been practiced in reality as well as the barriers and dilemma faced by the teachers.

The importance of learning environment on the effectiveness of learning has drawn the attention of many researchers. It was found that a close match between the students’ perceptions of the actual and preferred learning environments was likely to have positive effect on the attitudinal and cognitive learning outcomes (Fraser 1994, 1999). Instruments used to study different settings of learning environment have been developed in the past 30 years (Fraser 1998a, 1998b). In particular, Fraser, McRobbie, and Giddings (1993) had developed and validated the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI) to study the perceptions of students on laboratory learning environments. Such instrument was adapted in this study to explore the students’ perceptions of science laboratory learning environments in Hong Kong junior secondary schools. The results would be used to identify problems in the laboratory learning environments. Suggestions for improvements in the existing learning environments would be made and ultimately it is hoped that better learning outcomes can be achieved. Specifically, the main objectives of this study were:

(1) to find out the actual and preferred laboratory learning environments perceived by junior secondary students in Hong Kong;

(2) to compare the differences, if any, between the actual and preferred laboratory learning environments perceived by students.

The adaptation of the SLEI to junior secondary levels in this study is by no means trivial as it was first developed and validated at the senior secondary level (Fraser, McRobbie & Giddings, 1993). Thus the validation of the SLEI in this context was a prudent process which is worthy of attention for future studies.