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.
[Copyright of Music Education Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613800903390741]

This paper investigates the determinants of student attendance of economics classes. Course-specific and individual-specific factors are shown to have significant impacts on class attendance. It was found that female students and overseas students skip classes less often. Surprisingly, students involved in extracurricular activities attend classes more often than students who are not involved in these activities.
[Copyright of Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600800802385237]

This study investigated the connection between drawing skill and artistic creativity in relation to age groups and levels of artistic involvement among 223 Chinese primary, secondary, and university students in Hong Kong. Based on the fantasy drawing task, visual-artist judges made expert judgments on students' drawing skill and artistic creativity. There was substantial correlation between drawing skill and artistic creativity among children, adolescents, and young adults, even when artistic involvement was controlled in the partial correlation analyses. The results of correlational and regression analyses suggested that drawing skill contributed most significantly to the prediction of artistic creativity throughout the years at different stages of development, but artistic involvement became more important, especially in young adulthood. Implications of the findings on the skill-creativity relationship for arts education and the directions for future research are discussed.
[Copyright of Creativity Research Journal is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400410903579528]

This paper explores two current issues in the educational policies and practices of Hong Kong that have been shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the UK to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997. Since this time there have been two great challenges facing music education. The first concerns how to incorporate diverse cultures, including Chinese music, into a Western-orientated music curriculum; and the second is to find a way to cultivate national identity and democracy through music education. The data presented here were collected via in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with music teachers, school heads and assistant school heads across 40 primary and secondary schools between 2006 and 2007. The findings can be explained by referring to the shortcomings of multicultural education and the underdevelopment of democracy in Hong Kong's education system.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300902809203]

Learning strategies and affective factors could have a profound impact on student standardized mathematics performance. This study investigated gender differences in affective factors, learning strategies, and preferred learning situations, and how these variables affect math achievement of 15 year olds in the United States and Hong Kong on the PISA 2003 assessment. Math self-efficacy was found to be the best predictor of math performance in both countries. A striking mismatch was identified between Hong Kong students' superior math performance and extremely low math self-concept and between U.S. students' high confidence and weak performance. In addition, U.S. students' interest in math was significantly negatively related to their math performance. Contrary to a widely reported finding that East Asian students emphasize memorization, U.S. students were found to heavily rely on memorization strategies, which was also a negative predictor of math achievement.
[Copyright of International Journal of Testing is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15305050903106875]

Overexcitabilities (OEs) are ways that an individual experiences the world and can be understood as channels of information flow. The current study examined the profile of OEs among a group of Hong Kong children. Participants included 229 non-gifted and 217 gifted children. OEs were measured using the Overexcitability Questionnaire II. Results indicated that there were differences between the gifted and the non-gifted groups in all OE subscales. Gender differences were also identified. Females, in both gifted and non-gifted groups, have a significantly higher score in Emotional OE when compared to males. In addition, gifted females also scored significantly higher than their male counterparts in Sensual OE. Results of this study were compared to a group of American children (based on C.L. Tieso's work on overexcitabilities in 2007). The implications and limitations of this study are presented.
[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/10.1080/02188790903503601]

This article reports on both writers' experiences as participants in a collaborative action research project in Hong Kong. The article draws a distinction between teachers as research consumers and teachers as research producers. The authors suggest that active teacher agency in research is a positive element in the professional development of English teachers. Teachers primarily become research producers through involvement in some form of action research project. Although action research is increasingly recognized as a teacher competency in Hong Kong, it is nevertheless difficult for teachers to initiate and conduct when research is not seen as a core professional activity by their school with subsequent limited support. The authors view collaboration with professional researchers as a positive way for teachers to be apprenticed into the research process. The article ends by suggesting possible strategies that would support and encourage teachers to undertake research.
[Copyright of English Teaching: Practice & Critique is the property of Universidad del Zulia.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://edlinked.soe.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1]

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]