Experiences of developing an instrument to evaluate teaching of a general studies lesson

This paper will report the experience of the researchers in developing an evaluation instrument for teaching an interdisciplinary subject, General Studies in local primary schools. General Studies, introduced in 1996, represents a curriculum innovation because it integrates the subjects Social Studies, Primary Science and researchers to develop an instrument for evaluating a General Studies lesson. The instrument is developed Health Education, which were taught as separate subjects before. The implementation of this new curriculum compels the resed by making use of a variety of data sources, including interviews, lesson plan analysis and lesson observations which are employed in a case study of a General Studies teacher. The instrument thus produced will then serve as a tool for reflective teachers to self-evaluate their own teaching of an interdisciplinary subject which will facilitate the improvement of their teaching. (This study is part of the report on “A Case Study on the Teaching of an Interdisciplinary Curriculum: General Studies”. It focuses on the development of an evaluating instrument to analyse the teaching of an interdisciplinary curriculum in real classroom whereas the implementation of this curriculum by a beginning teacher is included in another paper of the same study.) Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.