To increase the competitive position in the higher education sector, management teams of self-financing institutions have to investigate critical factors influencing satisfaction of students studying at sub-degree and undergraduate degree levels so as to implement appropriate strategies in recruiting students. We adopted a model of Strategic Enrolment Management (SEM) to investigate student satisfaction on tertiary studies. 626 questionnaires were collected to investigate the critical factors affecting student satisfaction in studying self-financed programs. The findings revealed that marketing, admission, academic advising, career services, institutional research and peer influence are the critical factors affecting students' perceived satisfaction. The results provide insightful information and suggestions on how self-financing higher education institutions could improve student satisfaction and further strengthen their institutional strategies and management in increasing the competiveness. Copyright © 2018 International Economic Society.

本文從一名內部人士的視角來說明在香港參與補習的生活經歷，分別以學生、補習導師和研究人員的角色，對影子教育普遍存在的幾個問題給予分析並獲得啟示。本文採用自傳式敘事研究方法，數據來源於作者的事件回憶錄，受啟發於自身作為學員和導師時使用的教材、自己的視頻錄課，以及研究項目的反思日記。基於作者在補習行業扮演不同角色的敘述，本文討論了幾個主要問題，包括(1)影子教育對主流教育積極和消極影響的反思，(2)缺乏對補習教師和廣告質量的嚴格規範，(3)影子教育如何加劇教育不平等以及一些補習機構和非營利組織如何解決這一問題。就作者所知，本文是唯一一篇從作者自身作為學生、導師和研究人員的個人經歷來討論影子教育問題的文章，它從內部人士視角闡述了香港補習行業的實踐和政策發展。 This article aims to illustrate the lived experiences of engaging in private tutoring in Hong Kong as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher and draw implications on several issues arising from the prevalence of shadow education. This article adopted an autobiographical narrative approach. Data were collected through the author’s memoir of events, stimulated by the tutorial materials he used when he was a tutee and a tutor, his video-recorded lessons of tutoring, and reflective journals from his research projects. Various issues are discussed based on the narrative of the author playing different roles in the tutoring industry, including the positive and negative washback on mainstream education; the lack of strict regulation of the quality of tutors and advertisements; how shadow education may exacerbate education inequality; and how some tutorial companies and nonprofit organizations are addressing the issue. This article, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the only one that discusses the problems of shadow education from an author’s own personal experiences as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher. It illustrates how practices and policies of the private tutoring industry are evolving in Hong Kong from an insider perspective. Copyright © 2020 華東師範大學.

Purpose: Catering for learner diversity is a key issue in the recent educational reforms in Hong Kong. The present study addresses this issue through an investigation of the relationships between students' learning styles and approaches to learning in Hong Kong secondary schools.Design/Approach/Methods: A total of 6,054 junior secondary students in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire consisting of two instruments. A series of confirmatory factor analysis, two-way analysis of variance, and structural equation modeling analysis were conducted.Findings: The results identified three types of learning style among the students which are characterized by a cognitive orientation, a social orientation, and a methodological orientation. Some significant gender- and achievement-level differences were revealed. Compared with the socially oriented learning style, the cognitively and methodologically oriented learning styles were more extensively and strongly related to students' approaches to learning, even though these students showed a greater preference for the socially oriented learning style.Originality/Value: It is unwise to blindly cater for students' learning styles in classroom teaching and curriculum design. Teachers should adopt a comprehensive and balanced approach toward the design of curriculum and teaching which not only highlights the congruence between students' learning styles and teacher's pedagogy but also integrates the constructive frictions between them into classroom teaching. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

Globalisation has facilitated massive flows of immigrant students of diverse backgrounds into schools. These developments intensify concerns about immigrant youth's mobility and belongingness, and about the capacity of schools to integrate them into receiving societies. However, the diverse forms, experiences and effects of young schoolchildren's educational mobilities on belongingness are under-researched. This study addresses this gap by examining the links between mobility, belongingness and schooling experiences of 417 Chinese cross-border students (CBS). These students are permanent residents of Hong Kong but live on the mainland and travel across the border to school every day. A structural equation model shows that some dimensions of schooling experiences, notably better relations with local peers and more extracurricular school-based activities in Hong Kong, have stronger links to CBS's belongingness than students' personal and family characteristics and their hours on cross-border commuting. The implications of the findings, both at theoretical level and for enhancing young mobile child migrants' belongingness, are discussed. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the writing development of Hong Kong kindergarten students over 12 months. They attended 18 kindergartens territory-wide and were followed from June 2002 to June 2003 for the collection of three waves of teacher-rated data at six-month intervals.Design/methodology/approach: First, the construct validity of the translated and culturally adapted version of Morrow's (2012) checklist which assesses writing development was confirmed, considering that the students attended Hong Kong kindergartens who wrote in the Chinese language. The multilevel analysis, which employed corrected measures captured through Wolfe and Chiu's (1999a, 1999b) five-step Rasch scaling method for a common frame of reference, estimated the effects of the factors, namely, student age, gender, class level and schools.Findings: The children's progress over the second six months was also apparently much smaller than the first SIX months for this cohort. The dramatic slow-down in the second six-month period for both cohorts might be partly attributed to the peculiar arrangement of schooling at that time.Research limitations/implications: The recommendation from this study is that random sampling and student test scores on writing need to be taken for the identification of the general trend of young children's writing development in Hong Kong, as well as other Chinese communities alike.Originality/value: The profile of the student's emergent writing development at each six-month follow-up and over the 12 months was explored. Differences between the groups based on age, gender, class level and school in terms of student writing development on average were statistically significant. Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.Design/methodology/approach: Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong's school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure.Findings: Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong.Research limitations/implications: This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good

This article illustrates the interface of ethnic identities and a multi-ethnic learning environment in a predominantly Chinese society. Hong Kong – whilst reputed as an Asian international city – has displayed reticence in promoting multicultural initiatives and inclusiveness at a policy level. In this context, this study draws on a sociocultural perspective and interviews with a group of ethnic minority Filipino secondary school students. The interview data point to juxtapositions of ethnic identities with reference to students’ interactions with peers from same and different ethnic groups, ethnic in-group practices, and a schooling discourse that reflects Chinese language expectations and recognition of cultural diversity. The analysis, as a result, specifies how schooling experiences in this case become grounds for identity tensions in being a Filipino and a Hong Kong person. These tensions caution against tacit sociocultural relations in learning environments resulting from school-initiated multicultural practices without broader and explicit policy support for culturally diverse student population. Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the civic mission of schools and students on participation in school governance through an empirical study. It articulates the importance of school mission on nurturing citizenship of high school students.Design/methodology/approach - The research used a mixed method with questionnaire survey in the first phase and qualitative interviews in the second phase. Quantitative data were obtained from a survey completed by 3,209 students and 495 teachers (including principals) from 51 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Qualitative data were collected from 41 individual interviews with principals and teachers and 17 focus group interviews with 56 students in five case study schools.Findings - Both students and teachers believed that good citizenship qualities should include students’ participation in school governance. Schools in general took up the civic mission to nurture good and participatory citizens. A mission of nurturing students to become good and participatory citizens made a significant and positive contribution toward achieving students’ actual participation in school governance. However, students’ actual impact on major school policies was minimal. A paradox existed whereby students, knowing their influence over managerial issues was much circumscribed, still gave it a higher rating than their teachers.Originality/value - The paper contributes an empirical model for school leaders to develop school vision for promoting student participation in school governance. Based on a large-scale research supported by public funding, the paper contributes an empirical model for school leaders to develop school vision for promoting student participation in school governance. It further adds to the literature on relationship between citizenship education, civic mission of school and student participation in governance. Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited.

The concept of the associate degree is new to the Hong Kong tertiary education system. Public discussion and research have focused much on the policy and operational aspects of this tier, but empirical efforts to examine associate degree students' learning experiences and how it relates to the policy are relatively sparse. The present study characterised Hong Kong associate degree students' learning experiences in this new tier of tertiary education from the light of human capital theory using qualitative methods. Thirty-five students forming 11 focus groups participated in the study. The focus group interview was exploratory and semi-structured, inviting the students to discuss their transition experiences. Three themes were grounded on the data: 1) Inferior identity; 2) Dual purposes of associate degree; and 3) Intense competition and stress. The present finding regarding associate degree students' learning experience yields implications on policy-making; specifically on the provision of financial support to minimise the cost incurred and broadening of admission in order to make this tier an integral part of the tertiary education system in Hong Kong to promote public perception of economic gain. Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Aims: Little is known about the processes taking place in school‐based counselling, particularly in Hong Kong, where the sociocultural environment may influence these processes. This study investigated students' engagement with counselling from the perspective of students and school counsellors in Hong Kong.Method: Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with 25 ethnically Chinese students and eight counsellors over three schools in Hong Kong. Data were analysed thematically within a critical realist paradigm.Results: Four themes were developed which captured students' experiences of school‐based counselling: "Counselling embedded into the life of the school"; "Fears about counselling"; "Building a counselling relationship"; and "An ongoing but limited source of support." A top‐level theme called “Relationship in context” encompassed the four themes.Conclusions and implications: Counsellors' embeddedness into the school's organisational structure enabled them to act as an ongoing source of support, which students valued but which could also foster dependency. Counsellors taking on additional roles in the school led to confusion on the part of both students and counsellors and limited the effectiveness of counselling. Seeing counsellors as authority figures, being unwilling to disclose personal information outside the family and stigma around mental health issues were cultural perspectives which heightened students' fears related to attending counselling. Trust was an essential precursor of developing a counselling relationship in which the counsellor was perceived as warm, non‐judgemental, caring and empathic. A sensitivity to the sociocultural context and the embeddedness of counsellors in the school organisation are essential to the effective implementation of school‐based counselling. Copyright © 2019 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.