The effectiveness of different policies on promoting STEM education: A case study of a secondary school in Hong Kong

This study would like to find out the effectiveness of different policies that the Hong Kong government has posted for promoting STEM education in secondary schools. With McGinn (1999), successful education reform should include three main elements: financial support, trainings, and suit to the local culture. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four experienced teachers and the findings showed that teachers are satisfied with the financial support from the government. However, teachers also reveal their dissatisfaction in some fields: guidelines and teaching materials, workshops, curriculums, the content of the curriculum, and the atmosphere in the society.

This paper contributed to help to point out the missing areas of policies in implementing STEM education in secondary schools, and the government then can publish more focus policies to promote STEM education in secondary schools more efficiently. Beyond the discussion of the findings, six suggestions that about different problems that teachers have complained about were made. The study would like to make an insight on the topic, hoping to let STEM education implement more smoothly in future Hong Kong.