This chapter discusses a service learning course using combined board game activities and direct social skill teaching to enhance social and communicative skills of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students with ASD/social and emotional problems (aged 6–8) were invited to participate in an 8-week after-school training programme in a Hong Kong ordinary school. Each session was divided into two parts with 30 min of direct social skills instruction conducted by a teacher, followed by 60 min of board games facilitated by undergraduate students who were attending a social service learning course in a university. Most students with ASD engaged in playing board games and could apply the social and communicative skills that they learned in the training programmes. Facilitators also reported an increase in comprehension skills of students with ASD. Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This chapter discusses the effectiveness of current professional development programmes for teachers of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Hong Kong. The article first introduces the available services for students with ASD. The Resource Teaching Programme has been the major service provided by special schools since 1984. The principle of teaching students with special educational needs (SEN) in the least restrictive settings has rendered a rapid growth of the population of students with ASD in ordinary schools in the last decade, causing concern among the teachers. Different tiers of professional development programmes have been developed to equip teachers in ordinary schools with the knowledge and skills needed in dealing with students with SEN. However, these programmes are mainly short term and transmitted directly from the top down. The lack of opportunity to practise newly acquired knowledge and skills in real environments cannot provide sufficient confidence for teachers to handle students with ASD independently. The final part of this chapter provides a recommendation for a collaborative mode of professional development that can assist teachers in gaining practical experiences in a field-based training programme. Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the underlying difficulties of students with learning difficulties in Hong Kong. Based on the dual-route model of reading, words may be read by either a lexical (words are recognized as wholes) or a sub-lexical (words are recognized through grapheme-phoneme correspondence) procedure to read. Castles & Coltheart (1993) and Jimenez (2000) provided evidence for the existence of these two mechanisms in English reading and Spanish reading respectively. They suggested that deficits in one and/or the other mechanism would lead to different patterns of reading disability. Surface dyslexia results from impairment of the lexical procedure with an intact phonologyical route to reading. Phonological dyslexia results from a highly selective deficit in the grapheme-phoneme transformation mechanism. It was found that surface and phonological dyslexic reading patterns were also found in the Chinese children with learning difficulties. 本文主要目的是找出存在於有學習困難的學生的一些閱讀困難的模式。本於雙軌閱讀模式理論，讀者可依循義的途徑或聲的途徑來認字。Castles & Coltheart (1993) 及 Jimenez (2000) 的研究中，分別顯示英語及西班牙語系中，有部份讀者在運用義的途徑時會有障礙，而聲的途徑則沒有問題，部份讀者的情況則剛好相反。前者稱之為有表層閱讀障礙，後者為有聲層閱讀障礙。本文研究結果亦證明表層及聲層閱讀障礙模式存在於中文讀者之中。
[Copyright of Hong Kong Special Education Forum is the property of Special Education Society of Hong Kong Ltd.. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
https://sites.google.com/a/seshk.org.hk/seshk-org-hk/c_publication]

This study aims to deliver a school‐based mode of training for in‐service teachers of students with ASD in Hong Kong. The training is delivered following the phases of implementation science, namely, exploration, installation, and implementation. The project team used the theory of mind approach, which enables teachers to engage with students with ASD and to focus on recognizing and reacting to emotions. Participants in this study included four educators from a teacher education institution, three expert teachers, and 19 in‐service teacher trainees. The most salient responses came from trainees who were provided with the opportunity to apply learned skills in their own classrooms immediately and to share the knowledge and skills in dealing with students with ASD in the post‐conference meetings.
[Copyright of Support for Learning is the property of Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9604.12199]

The study seeks to understand the relation between preschool children's mode of participation and negotiation strategies during play and their theory of mind (ToM) development in the Hong Kong context. Forty-two 5-year-old children were recruited. Their emotional and cognitive ToMs were assessed along with expressive language ability. Children's play was observed twice in naturalistic and laboratory settings. Parents completed a questionnaire on their child's emotional and cognitive ToM development, including demographic information and social economic status indexes. The results showed that 5-year-old Hong Kong children mostly engaged in associative and cooperative play and employed two-way, reciprocal strategies in their play. Parent report of emotional ToM predicted children's play strategy in both naturalistic and laboratory settings. Child measure of cognitive ToM predicted their play strategy in the laboratory setting. The study advocates more play time in kindergarten in order to foster an empathetic generation.
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Professional Special Education training in Hong Kong is usually arranged in the lecture format. Furthermore, the provision of such courses for in-service teachers were often limited by the short duration of time. Videos, therefore, show the powerfulness to create learning experience in individual lessons for teacher training, as well as showing how the videos, combined with case studies, to complement the entire course as well as the practicum. Individual interviews were conducted to understand the process of the whole process of video learning. By applying the concept of scaffolding, the influence of videos and case studies on teaching and learning comes from the articulation of the participants, as well as the summative assessments. It is hoped that this article will inform the practitioners or teacher educators who would like to use videos and case studies to help teachers in understanding the needs of students with special needs.

This presentation will detail a programme designed to deliver field-based mode of training for language teachers in special schools and set up a school cluster system for teachers to have a platform for the interactive exchange of ideas, resources, services, and expertise. During the training period, lectures, demonstration observations and cross-site visitations were held. Members in the school cluster included a university educator, two specialist professionals of the supporting school and 10 teachers of participating schools. With the positive response of the participants, we feel that the programme presents a possible model for training and intervention.

The aim of the program was to deliver a field-based mode of training for language teachers of special schools and to set up a school cluster system for teachers to have a platform for an interactive exchange of ideas, resources, services, and expertise. Lectures, observation of demonstrations, and cross-site visitations were held. A number of two-school clusters were organized. Members in a school cluster included university educators, specialist teachers, and teacher trainees. University educators worked with specialist teachers to design and conduct the training program. Twenty teachers participated in the study as trainees. The responses from trainees were very positive.

This study examines the impact of a revised one-week training course on teacher self-efficacy in terms of improving teaching and learning strategies and classroom management to support students with special educational needs (SEN) in ordinary schools in Hong Kong. Various teacher-related variables (i.e., level of prior training in special education, confidence in teaching students with SEN, knowledge of legislation and policies, years of teaching, teaching experience with students with SEN, gender, and school type) are analyzed among 347 regular primary and secondary teachers. Teacher confidence and school type are determined to be significant predictors for the self-efficacy of teachers in inclusive education.
[Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.]

This study investigated changes in teacher self-efficacy for inclusive practice using a mixed method research design. Participants were 417 in-service teachers in Hong Kong taking a 1-week basic teacher-training course about inclusive education. Data were collected pre and post participation in the course using the Teacher Efficacy for Inclusive Practices Scale (TEIP). A series of five in-depth focus-group interviews provided greater clarification of the perceptions and efficacy issues of teachers. The best predictors to participants’ teaching self-efficacy were confidence in teaching students with special education needs (SEN) and knowledge of legislation and policies for inclusive practice. From the focus-groups, results demonstrated a more positive attitude change towards students with SEN with a number of essential factors emerging as highly beneficial for inclusive teaching in Hong Kong (i.e. caring and love, school environment and curriculum adaption). The discussion considers the role of short training programmes as an appropriate means to improving self-efficacy for teaching within inclusive classrooms in Hong Kong.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]