Dual-focused STEM hands-on activity for teachers’ professional development

The adoption of STEM hands-on activities in classrooms should not only focus on artefact building but also aim at helping students construct conceptual knowledge. For achieving such goal through teachers’ professional development, this study proposed a practice-based design. The design provided a dual-focused STEM hands-on activity which aimed at enabling teachers to build artefacts to construct science concepts as well as raising their awareness of what and how the pedagogies were employed. The first section consisted of a hands-on activity embedded with both science concepts and pedagogies, upon which reflection and discussions were held in the second section. Conducted as a case study with 49 participants of STEM in-service teachers, the results indicate that the participating teachers mainly focused on learning how to build artefacts. Although some participants were aware of the need to redesign the proposed hands-on activity to suit their students’ needs, most of them did not acknowledge the importance of pedagogies, but rather focused on improving technology skills. The study findings revealed what contemporary STEM teachers’ concerns in hands-on activity and their attitude towards adoption. Also, teachers’ concerns about and awareness of re-designing the STEM hands-on activity were addressed to provide references for the teachers’ professional development.