In August 2019, Taiwan released a new curriculum for the 12-year compulsory education. One of the key features of the new curriculum is the emphasis of skills or literacy rather than just the dissemination of content knowledge of specific discipline. The objectives of this study are to examine the role of science museum in supporting the new curriculum, in particular by organizing science teacher professional development workshops and evaluate science teachers’ perception of the importance and teaching feasibility of the science literacy related lesson plans at the end of the workshops. Museum educators adopted case study approach in developing a series of lesson plans and each lesson plan represents one of the three scientific literacy developed by the museum curators. The study was conducted in the summer of 2014, 2018 and 2019. During a two-day workshop session, museum educators demonstrated the three lesson plans: Mathematics and plant forms (2014), genetic modified food controversies (2018), and the crisis of the Swedish warship VASA (2019) to teachers. At the beginning and the end of each session, teachers were asked to complete a survey about the perception of these lesson plans. Among the survey items are the importance of the literacy skills and teaching feasibility of these skills in the school setting. Pair t-test analysis revealed that, for the two indicators of all three lesson plans, post-participating perception of importance and teaching feasibility are significantly higher than the perception before participating the workshop, indicating that the design of these lesson plans may have an effect of changing teachers’ perception of the teaching of literacy-based lessons. Additional analysis on teachers’ opinion for the questions “I think students can learn literacy skills from this lesson” and “I will adopt this lesson in my future teaching” was very positive, indicating that teachers found the lessons from the workshop is useful for their students as well as have some impacts on teacher’s future practice. This report will also discuss some directions for future research.
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