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The main goal of this High Scope Project centered on analyzing how the targeted vocational high-school teachers disenthralled themselves from the traditional settings to think and act anew during the inquiry curriculum design and implementation process. Ten teachers of a vocational high-school in southern Taiwan participated in this process and worked cooperatively with the theme of "Mechatronic" intelligent robot. A professional development program provided by the university research team was developed based on inquiry framework for equipping these teachers in designing the curriculum. Data were collected qualitatively and then analyzed by immersion and editing analytic techniques. After receiving the one-year professional development, a qualitative analysis on the targeted group of teachers' inquiry curriculum design process. According to the data analyses, three themes regarding this inquiry curriculum development process were extracted about the progress of their conceptions and actions, where each theme had its own developmental focus: curriculum structure, content design, and instructional design. The findings showed that these teachers progressively moved from more teacher-centered thoughts to student-centered actions incorporating inquiry. They also worked together in designing and implementing an inquiry curriculum leading to a success of disenthralling the traditional standard-based and subject-matter trammels, which truly furnished their students' learning with an interdisciplinary inquiry environment and obtained admirable outcomes. Implications derived from findings and discussions were proposed for the future study of implementing the designed curriculum and promoting teachers' continuous growth.

The purpose of this study was to explore possible developmental changes of vocational high school students' scientific inquiry competence while they learned within the "Mechatronics" inquiry-based curriculum and instruction. A case study approach was employed in this study, while multiple resources of 77 11 th graders' learning were collected and analyzed by using the editing analytic techniques. During the process of this two-year study, there were 11 changes of students' competence extracted from the data collected. These changes were inducted into 6 categories of scientific inquiry competences and then finally formed three themes, "basic competence, advanced competence, and critical competence". The result of this study was reported as a developmental triad of students' scientific inquiry competences. Based on discussions, as teachers, we have to actively implement the real-life problem-solving teaching practice to enhance students' scientific inquiry competences. The findings of this study also provided the insight that how teachers understood the scope and sequence in designing inquiry-based curricula. Finally, the dialogue between the findings and the literature reminded us that students' scientific inquiry competences could not be cultivated in a short time; instead, a long-term and context-driven curriculum design is the cornerstone to develop their competences for future learning and life.

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