Developing of Experimental Competence of Laos pupils in Secondary School Science Classroom

Abstract

How to help teachers to design teaching plan for raising student’s competency at secondary school in Laos is now of great concern. On the other hand, teachers teach sciences almost by lecturing theory only. They rarely explain the problems based on actual phenomena that occur in pupils’ daily life nor do experiment during the class. Thus, one of the vital concerns for Lao’s science education is that the summative and formative assessment for science learning are both only focused on evaluating the pupils’ knowledge. To improve the quality of learning and pave a new way for teaching by doing physics experiment, we developed a practical science course“Heat and temperature” with hands on activities and realistic application. For measuring experimental competence, the framework for practical assessment from Etkina 2002and Metzger 2012 was adapted and used (E. Etkina, Van Heuvelen, Brookes, & Mills, 2002) (Metzger, Gut, Hild, & Tardent, 2014) . In this paper, we describe the process and experiences of how to develop the course with comprehensive worksheets and hands on equipment. We also interpret the way to gather evidence of experimental competence during the course. After that, we present some initial results of the development of pupils’ competence during the course.