Developing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in Hong Kong context

Though recent curriculum reform of Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan all include creativity as one of their major learning objectives, however, creativity-enhancing teaching methods are seldom implemented in real classroom practice. This study presents a systematic method for designing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in traditional educational context, like Hong Kong. It suggests a comprehensive set of learning objectives, strategies for generating new activity designs, and rationales for selecting activities, and more than 20 different kinds of learning activities that are simple and easy to be infused into normal Physics lessons. To understand teachers’ and students’ opinions on these activities, they were tried-out in two secondary classes, and were introduced to 120 senior Physics teachers of Hong Kong. On the whole, teachers and students gave positive feedback and support the usefulness and suitability of this set of instructional designs. Results also revealed some obstacles in fostering creativity of Hong Kong students and some shortcomings of these activity designs. Copyright © 2004 HKIEd APFSLT.