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STEM education must start from three aspects: middle school, university, and employment

2019-12-10T09:41:24.617Z


The Productivity Council has earlier launched the "STEM Network" program to support secondary schools in organizing STEM (Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Education) courses, open up a platform for academic industry exchanges, and also try to attract students to participate in creative sciences through the program.


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Written by: Comment Editor

2019-12-10 17:35

Last updated: 2019-12-10 17:35

The Productivity Council has earlier launched the "STEM Network" program to support secondary schools in organizing STEM (Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Education) courses, open up a platform for academic industry exchanges, and also try to attract students to participate in creative sciences through the program to cultivate relevant talents. The bureau's chief innovation director, Zhang Zichang, said on Monday (9th) that he is very optimistic about the plan to attract students to participate in innovation and foster talent. However, the obstacles to the implementation of STEM education in Hong Kong cannot be changed by the government through one or two grants or one or two plans. The authorities must start from the three aspects of middle school, university and employment in order to restore the disadvantages of STEM education.

STEM should not be reduced to after-school interest

STEM courses can arouse students' interest in creative science, but it is still difficult to cultivate students into creative science talents. The Hong Kong government first proposed the promotion of STEM education in 2015, and devoted considerable resources to the development of various schools. The intention is good. However, how each school applies the grant will then become the scope of the school-based policy, and it is up to the school to decide. Some of them hire additional mentors to the school, or set up individual technical workshops once or twice, or add resources to the school, the pace of STEM development varies from school to school.

The government has promoted STEM education for many years, but its positioning is ambiguous and lacks unified planning. For most schools, STEM status is still an extracurricular activity. I & T should have become the development trend of future education, but at present, the school takes students to "build Lego" and play games. It is difficult to guarantee students' future employment. And some schools promote STEM in a similar way, which means that only students with better mathematical and physical abilities or "gifted" students have the opportunity to be selected to participate. In the end, Hong Kong's I & T may end up in an awkward end. A lot of STEM teaching resources are invested in the "elite students" of middle schools, but when a group of elite students enter university, they will not choose STEM related subjects. How effective the STEM education policy of extracurricular activities is, it is worthy of joint reflection by the Education Bureau and the Productivity Promotion Bureau.

How effective the STEM education policy of extracurricular activities is, it is worthy of joint reflection by the Education Bureau and the Productivity Promotion Bureau. (Profile picture / Photo by Li Huiyan)

ICT curriculum update underperforms the market

If the vision is returned from "extracurricular activities" to "regular courses", information and communication technology (ICT) should be the elective subject that has the most relationship with STEM in the diploma test of middle school, but its status is considered "chocolate". Elective students are only a minority. Since 2013, the total number of students and candidates for ICT exams at the DSE has declined at the same time, from 8,093 in 2013, to 5,983 in 2019. According to the 2019 Bureau of Evaluation, the number of ICT candidates is far less than half of the popular 11,000 to 14,000 subjects in physics, chemistry, biology, economics, business, accounting and finance (BAFS). Recall that Hong Kong has been promoting STEM education for nearly five years since 2015, but ICT courses have not yet become the mainstream choice for students. The current situation is inevitably questionable. Is there a problem with STEM's multi-year promotion? Or is the ICT curriculum simply not helping students?

The long-term sparseness of students reading ICT newspapers can be described as "useless" for subjects. Middle school ICT teachers expect student learning results to differ from the actual results of student self-assessment. Teachers think that the curriculum is useful, but students ask little to gain. In May this year, the Youth Creation Research Library survey on "Improving the Effectiveness of Information Technology Education in Junior High Schools" found that while teachers expected students to apply skills such as Excel, Word and Photoshop to practical work, about 70% of the students surveyed said they could only " Knowing the name of the technology "and" simple operation-related technology ", the teaching effect is far from teachers' expectations.

The effectiveness of ICT courses is not satisfactory, but there are still limits to reforms, which have been subject to "speed limits". As an assessment subject, ICT cannot be separated from the examination content. It is impossible to write a webpage for S.4, and transfer to S.6 for writing applications. The fastest reform can only take three years as a cycle, far from catching up with technology. For example, when the Education Bureau added Fan Wen to the Chinese Department, it still had to announce the contents of Fan Wen at the end of 2015, and prepare a new batch of high school students before they could officially assess the students in 2018. As the results of the Youth Research and Development Research Institute show, more than half of the middle school teachers interviewed believe that technology is developing too fast. For three years, technology development is already a technology gap between the three generations of "iPhone", but the curriculum is difficult to update quickly. The rapid changes in science and technology far exceed the speed limit of curriculum reform.

The rapid changes in science and technology far exceed the speed limit of curriculum reform. (Profile picture)

The way out for university innovation

The three-year design of the high school curriculum makes it difficult to quickly catch up with technological development. Its shortcomings should be remedied in college education. University courses are based on semesters. Students specialize in a certain field in the course. The professor also updates the course every year. After students learn new technologies, they are not immediately eliminated, allowing technology to outperform the course progress.

The government has invested resources in promoting STEM education in middle schools. It should allow students to build interest in middle school, build students' basic scientific and technological knowledge, and aim to attract students to continue to study in STEM subjects at universities. However, the situation in Hong Kong is partial and contrary to expectations. Students may be attracted by various STEM interest classes in middle school. However, at the university, STEM subjects in universities are still difficult to attract students to enroll. Hong Kong's lack of talents in innovation and technology has only made matters worse.

A major problem in the development of Hong Kong's innovation and technology industry is the lack of attractiveness of STEM degrees in local universities, which makes it difficult to attract elites from secondary schools. Taking the graduation salary data of college students as an example, the average starting salary points of university graduates who participated in the "information technology" and "construction" industries last year were $ 14,983 and $ 17,814, which are slightly better than other non-professional industries, but compared with medical and discipline The gap between troops, teachers, government officials, etc. is still quite obvious, and it is even more incomparable than investment banks and a large number of MTs (management trainees). Although student interest is an important consideration in the selection of subjects, while promoting the development of science and technology, it is difficult for science and technology industry salaries to attract talent.

The community often thinks that Hong Kong's innovation and technology is not popular because of insufficient training of talents, but this is like the problem of "chicken first, eggs first". If the government wants to promote STEM education, it should focus more on the innovation and technology industry and promote the structural reform of Hong Kong's economy and industry. Providing subsidies to enable a number of I & T companies to attract talents with high salaries, is also expected to drive I & T development and education.

[STEM Education] Is Hong Kong's Education Going The wrong Way?

[STEM education] Abandoning the exam-oriented culture is not a matter of day and night, and it is difficult to promote innovation education without uniform indicators

[STEM Education] Is it possible to run a creative education program if you have a lot of money in primary and secondary schools?

01 perspective

STEM Middle School Education 01 Viewpoint

Source: hk1

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