This paper examines the views of student teachers in Hong Kong on two mechanisms - supervised teaching practice and onsite peer observation (OPO) - which involve school-university partnership. Data were collected by using self-administered questionnaires (n = 59) and semi-structured interviews (n = 40). Results of the study indicated that student teachers regarded the two mechanisms as contributing to their learning and professional development. However, they highlighted a lack of school support for conducting OPO. Findings are discussed with reference to existing models of school-university partnership pointing to the possible existence of some aspects of a university-led model in which the university takes a dominant role in teacher education. Recommendations are made to formalise the operation of OPO in schools and to initiate a dialogue and cooperation between the participating parties involved in OPO so as to better facilitate student teachers' learning within a supportive school-university partnership.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530903335590]

Practicing teachers often engage in continuous professional learning with certain career considerations. Based on achievement goal theory, this study explored the effects of career goals on teacher's learning using a sample of practicing teachers in Hong Kong. Two forms of career goals were assessed using a questionnaire. Professional learning goals orient teachers to learn for improving professional competence by acquiring professional knowledge and understanding, and extrinsic career goals focus teachers on learning for tangible benefits such as career promotion and higher professional qualification. Results derived from regression analyses confirmed that professional learning goals were the most significant goals in predicting adaptive use of learning strategies, regulatory strategies, and positive attitudes towards learning. Extrinsic career goals predicted the use of surface strategies. This study also found that self-efficacy mediated the effects of different goals on learning. Cluster analyses provided additional findings confirming the importance of professional learning goals in teachers' goal profiles.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540601003754806]

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of teachers' professional knowledge construction in Assessment for Learning (hereafter, AfL). It presents a qualitative study of a school-based AfL Project which took place in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Thirty lessons video-recorded in the AfL Project and nine teacher interviews conducted after the Project were analyzed. The findings enrich our understanding of professional knowledge construction in four aspects: (1) personal nature of teachers' practical knowledge construction in contrived situations; (2) confined integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge in terms of 'skill progression that accompanies experience'; (3) more sophisticated integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge as 'practicalizing theoretical knowledge'; and (4) reflection, conscious deliberation, and 'theorizing practical knowledge' associated with more sophisticated professional knowledge integration. Implications for enhancing teachers' professional learning are discussed.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2010.517683]

This paper presents a qualitative study about how teachers entering the profession at different times over the last five decades made sense of their professional lives and continuing professional development (CPD) experiences against the backdrop of the CPD policy infrastructure and wider educational context in Hong Kong. The life history method was used. The findings of the study show that teachers' self-directed professional development was driven by a commitment to the moral purposes of teaching, characterized by their active agency in professional knowledge construction, and supported by facilitating organizational conditions in schools. The study also reveals that fierce competition among individuals and schools, intensification of work, stress, uncertainty and alienation on the part of teachers evidenced the de-humanizing effects of an increasingly managerialist and market-oriented approach to school education. Implications for educational leaders at policy and school levels and teachers will be discussed.
[Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131910802684748]

This article describes the development of an instrument - the Career and Talent Development Self-Efficacy Scale (CTD-SES) - for assessing students' self-efficacy in applying life skills essential for personal talent development, acquisition of positive work habits, and career exploration. In Study 1, data were obtained from a large sample of Chinese middle-school students (N=15,113) in Grades 7-9 in Hong Kong. The CTD-SES is an 18-item questionnaire with subscales containing items that address students' orientations toward developing their own talents, acquiring and applying positive work habits, and exploring their career possibilities. Evidence is provided for internal consistency, temporal stability, and factor structure of the CTD-SES. Goodness of fit statistics provided support for a three-primary-factor-plus-higher-factor model, and this solution was used in the statistical analyses. The data also indicated that students with plans for university study reported significantly higher scores than those without on all three domains of career and talent development. In Study 2 (N=308) Grade 10 high-ability students' scores in CTD-SES were correlated with scores in career decision self-efficacy and academic performance. The development and validation of CTD-SES is the first step toward investigating career exploration, work habits, and talent development among Asian middle-school adolescents.
[Copyright of High Ability Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2010.488089]