STEAM for ALL
STEAM Education contributes to secondary school curricula globally because it integrates different disciplines of knowledge to give students significant benefits. One of the essential agendas for quality STEAM education is to provide students with hands-on experiential learning. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number four emphasises inclusive and equitable quality education for all. However, students with special educational needs (SEN) in some schools may not have an equal chance to receive quality STEAM education because of different constraints and concerns, such as problems in classroom management, expensive equipment, large class size, etc. Consequently, SEN students may be neglected because they may not have the chance to participate actively in STEAM activities. This lack of SEN students' engagement in STEAM education should be avoided if we value SDG No. 4. This project partners with two secondary schools that have enrolled many SEN students to provide quality STEAM education to their students. First, we recruit EdUHK full-time students to join this project on a volunteer basis. Second, we arrange workshops to develop participants' competency in conducting STEAM activities. Third, participants conduct on-site STEAM teaching at the secondary schools. This project matches SDG Nos. 4 and 17 to provide quality STEAM education to SEN students.
Project Start Year: 2025, Principal Investigator(s): CHAN, Chi Keung
SDGs Information: 4 - Quality Education, 17 - Partnerships for the Goals
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Developing Manipulative Skills of Pre-service Chemistry Teachers in Practice
This project aims to develop inexperienced and pre-service chemistry teachers’ manipulative skills to accomplish three selected practical laboratory tasks required by the HKDSE Chemistry curriculum and public exam. This teacher development project is crucial because practical laboratory work is integral to chemistry education. Students with competent manipulative skills can ensure laboratory safety and better opportunities to learn chemistry by doing science. Teachers are students’ role models of manipulative skills for practical laboratory work. Therefore, this project refers to the five-level hierarchy framework proposed by Fadzil and Saat (2017) and adopts a four-stage systematic approach to empower project participants towards the project aim progressively. There are three distinctive features of the project. First, both declarative and procedural knowledge for accomplishing practical laboratory work will be emphasised. Second, experienced mentors will intensively shadow project participants to develop L&T materials. Third, project participants will conduct on-site teaching in local secondary schools to actualise their manipulative skills. We expect to produce three sets of L&T materials at the end of the project. Furthermore, this project nurtures competent teachers to use practical laboratory work to enhance chemistry learning and teaching.
Project Start Year: 2025, Principal Investigator(s): CHAN, Chi Keung
SDGs Information: 4 - Quality Education
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Developing Assessment Literacy of Pre-service Science Teachers in Practice
This project aims to develop pre-service science teachers’ assessment literacy by engaging them in the development of an online open platform that fosters virtual learning, teaching and assessment of the HKDSE Chemistry curriculum. This project borrows the conceptual framework of Teacher Assessment Literacy in Practice (TALiP) from Xu and Brown (2016). The framework of TALiP consists of three levels of mastery: (1) Basic mastery of educational assessment knowledge, (2) Internalization of understanding and skills through practice, and (3) Making self-reflection on one’s own identity as an assessor. In this project, participants will be provided with a series of workshops to develop their knowledge and understanding of assessment, conceptual change, and metacognition. Second, they will be shadowed by the project team, which comprises a pool of experienced and well-trained experts in assessment development and analysis. The participants will develop high-quality MCQs with written feedback during the mentorship process. Furthermore, they will develop well-planned short teaching videos to explain the concepts related to the MCQs. The MCQs to be developed in this project will be leaner-oriented, where the leaner’s common alternative conceptions/misconceptions and their conceptual change and metacognition will be thoughtfully considered. Third, an online open platform will be developed to include all the materials and enable the participants to gather feedback from secondary school chemistry teachers and students. Finally, participants will be guided to make learning reflections concerning their development of assessment literacy. To conclude, this project develops pre-service science teachers’ assessment literacy by engaging them in contextualized practice through a mentorship scheme.
Project Start Year: 2023, Principal Investigator(s): CHAN, Chi Keung
SDGs Information: 4 - Quality Education, 10 - Reduced Inequality, 17 - Partnerships for the Goals
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Self-directed Learning and Curriculum-oriented STEM Education with Progressive Components
The project aims to enhance self-directed learning in STEM education, strengthen the connection between STEM and subject curricula, incorporate authentic problem-solving elements, and develop students' problem-solving abilities progressively. The main goal is to develop the capacity of school leaders and teachers to achieve these objectives. Additionally, the project aims to cultivate students' values and virtues throughout the STEM learning process.
Project Start Year: 2022, Principal Investigator(s): TSANG, Po Keung, Eric (CHAN, Chi Keung as Collaborator)
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Provision of Fish Specimen Mounting Service
This project is sourced from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD). The project aims are: (1) Produce around 150 transparent fish specimens for different species and in various forms, (2) Provide on-site fish specimen mounting services at the Fisheries Hall of Lions Nature Education Centre in Tsui Hang, Sai Kung, and (3) Provide defects liability and guarantee services which include maintenance services and technique demonstration workshop to AFCD. In particular, we referred to the literature on skeletal staining and modified existing methods for the fish samples of Hong Kong and Southeast Asian regions. We developed a double skeletal staining protocol with Alcian Blue and Alizarin Red S for the project.
Project Start Year: 2022, Principal Investigator(s): CHEANG, Chi Chiu (CHAN, Chi Keung as Co-Investigator)
SDGs Information: 14 - Life Below Water
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Innovative Exploration on Virtual Teaching and Learning of Science Experiments
Project Start Year: 2021, Principal Investigator(s): TSANG, Po Keung, Eric, CHAN, Chi Keung, CHOI, Tat Shing, CHONG, Yee Ling, LEUNG, Chi Fai, MAN, Mei Sum, YEUNG, Chi Ho
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Provision of Services on Production of Learning and Teaching Resources on Science Practical Tasks using Mobile Devices for Science (S1-3) Curriculum
This project is sourced from the Education Bureau. We developed four sets of L&T resources on practical tasks using mobile devices for junior secondary science. The resources are composed of: (1) Student and teacher versions of the worksheet for the practical learning tasks, (2) Technical information sheets on the use of mobile devices for conducting the designed practical learning tasks, (3) Videos with captions, infographics, background music, voice-over (Cantonese and English) and subtitles (Chinese and English), etc. to supplement the aforementioned practical learning tasks and the data treatment of the results, and (4) Safety measures for the use of chemicals and apparatus.
Project Start Year: 2021, Principal Investigator(s): YEUNG, Yau Yuen (CHAN, Chi Keung as Co-Investigator)
SDGs Information: 4 - Quality Education
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EdU Online Class Platform (EOCP) with Community of Practice (CoP)
This project aims at strengthening the EdU Online Classes Platform, and developing quality multi-media teaching materials to support the teaching of primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong.
Project Start Year: 2020, Principal Investigator(s): TSANG, Po Keung Eric 曾寶強 (CHAN, Chi Keung 陳志強 as Co-Investigator)
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Nurturing Teaching Competencies of Bachelor of Education (Science) Students through Collaborative Teaching
This project aims at nurturing teaching competences of EdUHK students who are studying UGC-funded programme “Bachelor of Education (Honours) (Science)” (B.Ed. (SCI)) through collaboration with local secondary schools. Furthermore, this project aims at development of science-related L&T STEM resources. Lastly, the effectiveness of the developed resources and students’ teaching competencies will be evaluated.
The proposed project consists of three stages: (1) Development – to develop L&T resources that integrate elements of STEM into science related curricula; (2) Implementation – to implement the developed resources and activities in both formal curriculum and/or co-curricular learning for secondary school students by our B.Ed. (SCI) students; and (3) Evaluation – to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed L&T resources and teaching competences of the students.
Project Start Year: 2019, Principal Investigator(s): CHAN, Chi Keung
SDGs Information: 4 - Quality Education
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Environmental Health Impact Assessment on Crucial Environmental Contaminants and Associated STEM Education
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Project Start Year: 2019, Principal Investigator(s): LAM, Chung Wah James 林忠華 (CHAN, Chi Keung 陳志強 as Co-Investigator)
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Low-cost Online Experiments for Science Education in Hong Kong and China: Trial Implementation and Evaluation of Learning Effectiveness
In many disciplines of science and engineering education, online (or called remote-controlled) experiments are recently emerging as another important exemplar of technology-enhanced learning because it can support not only e-learning for engaging students with authentic experiments but also break through the spatial and temporal constraints of conducting experiments. Over the last two decades, there exist a number of famous remote-controlled experiments for engineering and science (mostly in physics) education but they are generally not only expensive but also difficult for widespread applications in education because of the proprietary hardware and software used for their development. Besides, many of those experiments were just converted directly from the existing traditional experiments by adding the remote control functions or features and so they generally lack effective pedagogies to make the best use of the online mode of learning. In the last two years, we have formulated an innovative low-cost and open-source approach for developing online experiments. Through the Internet, students can readily set and control the Arduino-based platform for conducting the experiments in their smart phones, tablets or computers at anytime and anywhere by using a web browser without installing any bulky and/or proprietary plugins. We shall integrate a kind of pedagogy called Prediction-Observation-Explanation into a number of online science experiments (as already been successfully developed at the EdUHK) for converting them into some self-contained courseware for students’ self-regulated learning.
Project Start Year: 2018, Principal Investigator(s): YEUNG, Yau Yuen 楊友源 (CHAN, Chi Keung 陳志強 as Co-Investigator)
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Application and Promotion of an Innovative Mobile Logger for Effective Teaching and Learning of Science and Environmental Studies
An innovative, multi-functional and low-cost datalogging system (called mobile logger with its specific app called SESlogger for any Android devices) was invented by the Project Leader in which some crucial strategies for student-centred learning and collaborative learning were specifically embedded in the design and development of this digital device for enabling learners to conduct many kinds of scientific experiments or field trip activities within or outside the schools. It is much cheaper than the commercial product by 10-15 times as it was built upon the Arduino open-source microcontroller platform and bundled with various kinds of sensors. The purpose of this project is to apply and promote the use of this new device to different education sectors in Hong Kong and overseas.
Project Start Year: 2017, Principal Investigator(s): YEUNG, Yau Yuen 楊友源 (CHAN, Chi Keung 陳志強 as Team Member)
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