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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science
Learning and Teaching, Volume 5, Issue 2, Article 1 (Aug., 2004) Vivian Mo Yin CHENG Developing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in Hong Kong context
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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science
Learning and Teaching, Volume 5, Issue 2, Article 1 (Aug., 2004) Vivian Mo Yin CHENG Developing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in Hong Kong context
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Context
Recently, governments of Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore and other Asian countries have imposed rapid curriculum reforms in their primary and secondary schools. In the reforms, creativity development is included as one of the major new learning objectives. In Hong Kong, creativity is now one of the three most significant generic skills across all subject curricula. However, suitable instructional methods for fostering creativity, especially that in science subjects of high forms, are not known.
In fostering creativity of students, Hong Kong suffers nearly all the constraints that a typical Asian place has. Our school culture is highly competitive, examination-oriented, and its learning is dominated by extrinsic motivation. Both teachers and students are used to rote-learning and expository teaching. The workload of teachers is heavy, and most of the teachers adopted a textbook approach in teaching. The schools have large class size (of around 40), lack of resources and physical space, a rigid time-table and offer nearly no choice of subjects (except that between art and science stream).
Hong Kong has a rigid and heavy core curriculum, and two important public examinations in senior secondary levels. Among all school levels, teaching and learning at senior secondary levels are most examination-orientated. The senior secondary Physics curricula focus mainly on the acquisition of concepts and knowledge, and applying them to solve numeric problems. The Physics examinations seldom involve open-ended questions, and creative thinking is nearly absent.
Nearly all Physics teachers in Hong Kong have little creative learning experiences in both their school learning and teacher training programs. Though the educational reform is induced, most teachers in Hong Kong have not yet received any re-training in creativity. Their understanding and aspiration in creativity are very limited. In Hong Kong, like in other Asian places of which governments impose rapid curriculum reform, the operational or implemented curricula schools have great discrepancies from the formal or intended curricula. Due to the lack of monitoring in curriculum implementation and the lag-behind of reforms in assessment methods, teachers of Hong Kong have no strong incentive to induce changes to their teaching.
Besides the constraints in the educational system, Hong Kong has a strong Chinese culture of collectivism that treasures conformity, discipline, obedience and authorities. In a large class size, teachers extremely concern about classroom discipline. Most of them cannot tolerate free talking and movement, or any kind of disorder in their classrooms. In the traditional Chinese culture, people mostly believe that basic skills and knowledge are important, and should precede creativity development. They appreciate children’s serious effort in learning, and consider playful attitudes to be harmful to learning. Several educators suggested that these cultural factors may be detrimental to the creativity development of Chinese students. (Biggs, 1996; Cheng, 2004; Gardner, 1997; Watkins, 2000)
Approaches adopted by this study
There are several approaches for teaching thinking. First approach is characterized by direct instruction of thinking in non-curricular contexts. Students learn how to use explicit thinking strategies outside the standard curriculum. In western countries, there are quite a number of these pull-out creativity programs, in which some of them involve science elements. They include the Productive Thinking Program, Purdue Creative Thinking Program and Future Problem Solving Program (Cropley, 1999; Plucker and Runco, 1999; Ripple, 1999). Second approach employs methods, which promote thinking in curricular contexts. The tasks are content-oriented, and their goal is usually to yield a deeper understanding of what is being taught. No thinking strategies are taught explicitly. Third is the infusion approach, in which content lessons are restructuring for direct instruction in thinking skills and processes (Swartz, Fisher and Parks, 1998). The approach taken by this study is similar to the second approach. It is content-oriented, but the thinking activities go beyond yielding a deeper understanding of the content. Creative thinking elements are purposely infused into regular Physics curricula for fostering creativity of students. However, in the present Hong Kong contexts, constraints of time and teachers' background do not support direct instructions of thinking in normal lessons. Enhancing the understanding of the content is still a core concern of most teachers in Hong Kong .
In the previous section, a number of western studies that discussed how to foster creativity in science learning are reviewed. However, most of the instructional designs suggested are quite sophisticated, and they are greatly different those being used by teachers in Hong Kong. The present study would demonstrate how a set of simple creative learning activities can be developed for students in Hong Kong and those in other places with similar cultural contexts. This set of activities would address to the described constraints and can be infused into normal Physics classroom teaching in senior secondary school levels. On the whole, the design of this set of learning activities is based on the creativity theories and science instructional designs found in western literature. Therefore, another aim of this study is to develop ways to adapt the western creativity-enhancing methods into Chinese classrooms.
Copyright (C) 2004 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 5, Issue 2, Article 1 (Aug., 2004). All Rights Reserved.
