Teacher beliefs about curriculum design affect the quality of science education in schools, but
science researchers know little about the interrelation of beliefs about alternative curriculum
designs. This article describes a quantitative study of secondary science teachers' beliefs about
curriculum design. A 33-item Science Curriculum Orientation Inventory (SCOI) was developed
to measure five distinct orientations to curriculum: academic, cognitive processes, societycentred,
humanistic, and technological. Data were collected from 810 integrated science,
chemistry, physics, and biology teachers in Hong Kong. A confirmatory factor analysis of teacher
responses to the SCOI indicated that science teachers' beliefs about curriculum design had a
hierarchical structure; the five distinct curriculum orientations were positively correlated, forming
a second-order curriculum meta-orientation. Physics teachers were less society-oriented than
biology, integrated science and chemistry teachers, and integrated science teachers were more
humanistic than physics teachers. Although science teachers' beliefs about any of the five
alternative curriculum designs did not vary with their teaching experience, the difference between
beliefs about the cognitive processes orientation and the humanistic orientation increased when
teachers had gained more teaching experience. Implications of these findings are discussed.