Science laboratory learning environments in junior secondary schools

The statistically significant and noticeable differences between the students’ perceptions of the actual and preferred laboratory learning environments in the Open-Endedness scale were the highest among the five scales of the SLEI. Such differences reflected that the students were not satisfied with the present learning environments and preferred to have a more open-ended investigative learning approach in their science laboratory classes. The other four scales had only small differences between the actual and preferred environments. Students perceived themselves having good relationships among the peers as indicated by the high scores in the Student Cohesiveness scale in both the actual and preferred environments. The SLEI data in fact showed that the inquiry investigative learning approach as advocated by the science curriculum in Hong Kong seems not to be widely practiced in the junior secondary science laboratory environments.

Interviews with teachers also found that teachers were willing to provide a learning environment for the investigative inquiry approach. However their concerns in the technical dimension, the political dimension and the culture dimension made the teachers hesitate to implement such approach in the laboratory environments.

This study showed that despite high cohesions among students as well as teachers’ favourable desire for the investigative inquiry approach in their science teaching, there are a number of other unfavourable factors, such as discipline problems, safety, large class size, laboratory support and examination culture, impeding the actual implementation of the inquiry approach in the science laboratories. Further studies are needed to look into how these factors, especially the issues on discipline problems and examination culture, affect the implementation of the open inquiry learning in laboratory environments, and what the possible resolutions to these issues would be.

The present study found that the SLEI did provide us with a reliable and useful tool to probe students’ perceptions on the laboratory learning environments. A translated version of the SLEI with careful use of the wordings is helpful in the understanding of the science learning issue in a local context. Although the problems of the technical dimension, the political dimension as well as the cultural dimension identified in the study are difficult to tackle in the meantime, the study did show us the areas that we could improve in the laboratory learning environments so that an investigative inquiry approach can be implemented effectively. Teachers and school administrators could make use of the results to improve science learning and teaching in their schools.