This essay explores the nature of the curriculum content of liberal studies--a core school subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong--with reference to the curriculum- making processes entailed in the formation of that subject. The central thesis is that a school subject is introduced to schools and classrooms as a distinct representation of content embodied in curriculum materials, entailing a theory of content--a special way of selecting, organizing, and framing the content for social, cultural, educational, curricular, and pedagogical purposes. Knowing the content of a school subject thus entails knowing more than the content per se; it entails an understanding of the underlying theory of content, which is necessary for disclosing and realizing the educational potential embodied in the content.
[Copyright of Journal of Curriculum Studies is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270902767311]

Background: The latest report by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), issued in 2006, indicated that Hong Kong Primary 4 Chinese students outperformed children from 45 countries and provinces in reading comprehension tests that measured their higher-order reading proficiency. However, the study gave no indication of how factors such as attribution beliefs, motivation and strategy use might contribute to reading proficiency.
Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, i.e. their 'attribution beliefs', and their motivation, metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and reading comprehension.
Sample: The subjects consisted of 120 Grade 5 Chinese students (55 boys and 65 girls) from one Hong Kong primary school that uses Chinese as the medium of instruction. The school represents a typical primary school located in a Hong Kong urban area, with most students coming from low-income families. There was a wide range of academic ability and the average age of the students was 12.2 years.
Design and methods: A quantitative approach was adopted in the research. Students were required to complete three questionnaires and two reading comprehension tests. The three questionnaires measured students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, and their self-reported motivation and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. The reading comprehension tests measured students' higher-order reading proficiency. Multiple regression analysis techniques were used to examine the relationship between students' beliefs and motivation, metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, and how they predicated students' reading comprehension.
Results: The findings showed that students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, and their intrinsic motivation and metacognitive awareness of the use of reading strategies were associated with their

This study draws upon an ecological perspective to examine parental involvement in homework and its relationship with primary school children's educational outcomes within the Chinese sociocultural context of Hong Kong. Data were collected using homework diaries and questionnaires administered to 1,309 pairs of students and parents spanning all six primary grade levels in 36 primary schools in Hong Kong. Results show that primary children across grade levels devote a substantial amount of time each day after school to homework assignments and revision, while parents' involvement in the homework process varies. Such variation in parental involvement is found to relate to the child's grade level as well as the parent's educational attainment. Gain in children's academic efficacy with higher parental involvement level is observed among junior primary students as well as those with parents of lower educational attainment. Implications for the school's role in involving parents in the homework process are discussed.
[Copyright of School Community Journal is the property of Academic Development Institute.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.adi.org/journal/]

Little research has been done on the choices of mentors when they are offered a comprehensive range of roles. The mentors in this study were in their first attempt as mentors and did not have an assigned 'role'. They were involved in a mentoring course that sought to facilitate the placement of in-service teachers and school-institute partnerships. Findings suggested that there was a tendency of the mentors to take an authoritarian role on the rights and wrongs of protégés' teaching while managing to maintain trust and warm relationships. A particular interaction pattern between the mentors and protégés emerged. There were signs of a clear preference for performing the role of guiding teaching evaluations and the mentor teachers had a very positive attitude towards providing 'assistance' to the less experienced teachers. Nevertheless, room for the development of flexibility, creativity and initiative on the part of the protégés was limited by a number of contextual factors.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530903043970]

In this paper, we report on an inquiry exploring the experiences of 10 mainland Chinese student teachers of English so as to understand why they came to Hong Kong for a teacher education programme. The study revealed that these students were largely attracted to teaching in Hong Kong because of its extrinsic benefits such as professional stability, the prestige associated with the English language teaching profession and the opportunities to acquire valued skills transferable to other professions including English competence. Facing challenges as non-local students, they were also uncertain of becoming teachers in the new context. As 'elite' Chinese students were often unwilling to become teachers, we found it strategic to attract a large number of talented non-local students to the teaching profession and retain them. We conclude the paper with recommendations for various stakeholders to support these non-local students' adaptation and development as committed and competent teachers in local schools.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607470902771037]

Collaborating with universities in Hong Kong, Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia the research project outlined in this paper takes up one of the key initial findings related to the importance of children's online spaces away from school. The project brings together complementary strengths from each partner nation to assist our mutual need to understand the worlds of our young "netizens" - the new public citizens of cyberspace. Differing in social and cultural context, each setting is recognised as a strong contributor to understanding the competencies of young people's digital expertise. We work from the shared view that the arrival ofWeb 2.0 and 3.0 social networking tools is educationally challenging and demands futuristic thinking for sustainable education and social connectivity globally. Our research aim is to use a common research design to discover how young people are behaving in the new online spaces; what guides their decision-making; and what, if any, common values appear to emerge when results between countries are compared. Locally derived knowledge gained from samples of 12-year-olds will be subjected to cross-cultural comparisons and validation. In doing so, we make some assumptions about the homogenising process that shared global networks may be fostering. Bringing together these contributions will strengthen the decision-making process and provide new knowledge about meaning making, agency and citizenship for the twenty-first-century e-democracy. This paper reports on the conceptual process underlying the research and the research design.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382040903251158]

The year 2008 marked the 11th anniversary of Hong Kong's return from the UK to the People's Republic of China. In this decade, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government has repeatedly emphasised the importance of the development of national identity and patriotism in school education, and has at the same time introduced diverse cultural values into the school curriculum. This article explores the dynamics and complexity of the relationships between the state, globalisation and nationalism in Hong Kong that are re-shaping music education in response to contemporary socio-political changes. It argues that Hong Kong school music education has made a gradual cultural shift towards globalism and nationalism, and away from the Westernism that has dominated Hong Kong music education since before the change of sovereignty on 1 July 1997. The article concludes with a discussion of how music education might juggle two pairs of relationships in the curriculum: between global and national cultures; and between the education of cultural values and nationalism in Chinese music. There is pressure to rethink teacher education in terms of the need to be aware of the socio-political environment in which it operates, and within which it makes music education socially relevant.
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Human resource (HR) management is defined as the sum of activities employed by an organization to attract, develop, and retain people with the appropriate knowledge and skills for effectively and efficiently achieving organizational goals. An understanding of the HR practices in schools is important, as the assembly of a team of qualified and committed teachers, directly or indirectly, affects the quality of instruction in general and in particular in Hong Kong, where a high wastage rate of new teachers has been recorded. The literature has emphasized the importance of each HR element in school and yet not much work has been done that attempts to link the various HR elements together, even though the complementarities and interdependencies among these practices have been acknowledged. The present study aims to provide a general picture of the HR practices in schools from the perspective of beginning teachers, using a quantitative methodology. In addition, the link between these practices and the beginning teachers' commitment was also examined. The findings confirm the complexity and diversity of HR practices in Hong Kong schools and suggest that the practices in the areas of Training and Development and Working Conditions warrant special attention as they are linked to the affective commitment of new teachers to schools.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188790903092878]

Data from Hong Kong PISA 2003 show that 15-year-old Hong Kong students who have immigrant parents from mainland China are grossly overrepresented in grades below the modal grade attended by most native Hong Kong students. Same-age comparison, when grade level is not taken into account, puts immigrants' children at a disadvantaged position in the mathematics, reading, and science literacy tests. The academic advantage of immigrants' children in Hong Kong is only revealed after grade is statistically controlled. Also, mainland immigrant students who are repeaters outperform native Hong Kong repeaters. Immigrant redshirting is a possible driving force behind these results.
[Copyright of Educational Research & Evaluation is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13803610903087078]