| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台中師範學院 === 自然科學教育學系 === 89 === This research was conducted to explore how a professional development group was formed and operated, the way elementary science teachers interacted with one another as well as what they experienced to improve their science teaching.
The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows:
Firstly, science teachers found their ways to solve the problems on teaching and thus promoted teacher''s professional growth during the meeting.
Secondly, by changing the exam/learning system, science teachers in this group learned to recognize students'' abilities, various attitude and co-operation with other students during the practical sessions, so that they were able to identify how much their students had acquired in the learning. Moreover, science fair contest was found to be a good tool for stimulating students'' willing of involvement and process skills to inspire their scientific creativity.
Thirdly, interactive discussions and sharing personal experiences were found to be a good way for teachers to get more professional knowledge. In addition, the internet home-page designing activity not only improved their independent research ability also offered more options for science teaching.
Fourthly, teaching beliefs and teaching practices of two teachers'' in this group were observed to have changed obviously.
Fifthly, some difficult problems were encountered during running this professional growth group, such as the administration interfering with sample teachers'' science teaching, the school climate resisting change, the conflict to reach group''s common consensus and individual participant''s motivation etc. Because of those difficulties, several participants dropped off; however, most participants still gave their strong support for this group.
Based upon the previous findings, it is suggested that science teachers should keep on life-long learning and improve their teaching practices by setting up their own professional development groups.
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