Before talking about the current issue of this online journal, it is glad to report that the first monograph as derived from this online periodical has just be published.  It is called the "Innovative Ideas in Science Teaching: Theories and Exemplars". Apart from the 3 prominent educators’ articles, there are nineteen articles selected from the first 3 issues of the APFSLT after some internal and external reviews.This monograph consists of 5 parts with 186 pages in total. 

In this Volume 3 Issue 2, it is our pleasure to have Dr. Gregory THOMAS, the new Head of the Science Department, Hong Kong Institute of Education to discuss about some key questions on the training of science teachers in our Foreword section. Although his article is called "Some key questions with no easy answers", it is in fact that he shares with us some of his sharp ideas on some possible approaches. In the Academic Articles section, we got two peer-reviewed research papers on two fundamental aspects of science education - "Assessment of student work in Science" (by May CHENG) and "Packaging constructivist Science teaching in a curriculum resource" (by Peter AUBUSSON and Kevin WATSON).  The first paper discusses about some methods of effective assessment in science and provides many exemplars of students' work in various countries as collected by an international project called "Schools Around the World" while the second research paper deals with the implementation of a curriculum resource which is packaged with the constructivist approach on Science teaching.

In the General Articles and Multimedia Resources section, we have nine pieces of articles contributed by some science and environmental educators in Hong Kong, mainland China (Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing), Taiwan and Australia. Three of them are related to the current trend or development in curriculum at the macroscopic level - "The concept and framework on the development of a cross-disciplinary curriculum for Guangzhou primary schools" (by Xi MAI), "Comparison of environmental studies programmes between universities in mainland China and Hong Kong", "'Green Schools' in China" (by Fang XIAO)  and "Comparison of environmental studies programmes between universities in mainland China and Hong Kong" (by Eric TSANG and Xiao-yong CHEN).  Those articles could probably be used as some good sources of information for research in comparative education. As exemplars on research-based teaching of primary science, there are three articles centred around children's conception of science, to wit "Using toys and surprise events to teach about air and flight in the primary school" (by Russell TYTLER), "Effective learning strategies to support children's construction of science concepts" (by Winnie SO) and "Where is light? A survey on the alternative conception of light and shadow" (by Tian WANG and Yuandong XIE).  The remaining three articles are all related to the teaching and learning of Physics experiments at secondary school but their approaches are substantially different from one another. "A brief report on the first physics experiment design competition by high school students in Guang Dong" (by Xiaojun WANG, Zhiwen TANG and Jianlv ZHONG) is a kind of project learning embedded with certain favour of design and creativity. "A new way of computing power supply's electromotance and internal resistance" (Lifei LAI, Xiaojun WANG and Xianqiu WU) employs computer programming to carry out data analysis based on the well-known method of least-square fitting. The last article "The application of electronic insect catcher in teaching university Physics" (by Daujeng LWO) is another good practice of the Science, Technology and Society approach. As usual, all those articles are available for retrieval in the Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf) and there are other 45 multimedia resource files (of 480 MB in total size) available for classroom teaching or self-learning purpose in our Download section.

Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to Prof. Beverley BELL (Waikato University), Prof. Chao-Ti Hsiung (Normal Taipei Teachers' College), Dr. Chi Sum MAN (Green Power), Prof. John Loughran (Monash University) and many members of our Editorial Board (Mr. Man Tak CHAN, Dr. Sing Lai CHAN, Dr. May CHENG, Dr. Pun Hon NG and Dr. Winnie SO) for providing the critical peer-review and polishing of all the contributed articles. Besides, I am very grateful to Prof. Xiaojun WANG and Prof. Jingling LIU for their great help in calling for many quality contributions in mainland CHINA. Thanks are also due to all those who have contributed articles in this issue and to all research assistants and colleagues in the HKIEd Science Department who offered their assistance in developing and promoting this online periodical.