A previous study mentioned that students' action responses towards water pollution are incongruent with the training they received in schools. Conducting a course of two weeks with elementary students (N = 22) aged 9-10 in Hong Kong, the study aims to connect primary students' perceptions of the causes, consequences and responsive actions on water…

International studies of science education, such as the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), have revealed considerable national disparities in students' achievements in science education. The results have prompted many nations to compare their science education systems and practices to those of others, to gain insights for…

Building on Carey and Smith's work on epistemology of science, this study characterized elementary students' scientific epistemology from the role-of-idea and theory-building perspective. The participants included 102 elementary students in Hong Kong. Open-ended questions and coding schemes were developed to examine and characterize their…

Data collection, organization, and analysis are indispensable means of seeking solutions during the process of inquiry. Representations (called inscriptions by some educators) including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations are powerful ways of arranging and displaying data in visual form. This study aims to analyze quantitatively the use of…

The visual mode provides emergent bi/multilinguals an essential resource to construct scientific explanations. Yet, while a metalanguage is used to describe the written mode of scientific language such as, claim, evidence, reason; there is little research that makes students aware of the metalanguage of a visual mode. We propose an introduction to…

This paper reports an initial study on investigating inquiry-based learning in science in an upper primary class guided by an inquiry-based learning model in a seamless learning environment. Two questions are addressed: (1) how students advanced their domain knowledge?; and (2) how students developed their inquiry skills? One teacher and 27…

As more primary and secondary students worldwide seek after-school tutoring in academic subjects, concerns are being raised about whether after-school tutoring can raise average test scores without widening the variability in student performance, and whether students of certain ability levels may benefit more than others from after-school…

The written representation in Chinese can be considered as a pictorial or a symbolic representation which is very different from English where the pronunciation is related to how the word is spelt. Students face challenges of a very different nature when science is learnt in Chinese compared with English. In Hong Kong, students are making…

A paper was published in JBE in 2001 which examined the background of the education reform launched in 2000 in Hong Kong, and reviewed existing practices as well as beliefs in science and biology assessment among secondary teachers in Hong Kong. The direction of the reform was to take the emphasis away from public examinations as the sole…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Conference on Education and New Developments 2015-END 2015, taking place in Porto, Portugal, from 27 to 29 of June. Education, in our contemporary world, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of the human being, in the way one thinks, feels and…