To facilitate lifelong learning, recent education reforms have emphasized the development of generic capabilities. However, despite various lists found in previous studies, generic skills and capabilities have neither been well defined nor statistically validated. The present study attempted to (a) conceptualize generic capabilities in terms of 3 dimensions--cognitive, academic, and self, and (b) test the construct validity of generic capabilities using confirmatory factor analysis. Students who attended a continuing education program that was designed to provide an alternative pathway for students who failed in the Hong Kong secondary school system to pursue continuing education (N=2,806) responded to 13 survey items about their generic capabilities before the program (Time 1) and 13 parallel items after it (Time 2). Results supported a multidimensional structure of generic capabilities with the three dimensions at each time point. The conceptualization of a multidimensional structure provides a useful framework for the study of generic capabilities. It also calls for attention to the importance of generic capabilities in curriculum design.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

This paper reports the interim findings of a longitudinal study which aims at exploring the effectiveness of a 3-year English Enrichment Programme, on top of the regular English curriculum, in exposing secondary students to more subject-specific English while they learn their content subjects in the mother tongue. The study was carried out in response to the Hong Kong government's decision to firmly promote mother tongue teaching in her post-colonial era after 1997. To evaluate the effectiveness of this programme on students' learning of English, in-depth study with selected schools was done and different research tools including questionnaires, lesson observations, interviews and language proficiency tests were used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. It is found that the increased exposure to English may have had a positive effect upon students' perception of learning English, if not on actual performance. A closer look at the cases, however sheds light upon the intricate interplay between factors leading to the different degrees of perception about the effectiveness of the programme. These factors include: the willingness of the school to pool resources and efforts in making the most of the programme, the language competence of students, and the teaching focus and methods in class. Recommendations on the way forward will be discussed.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

The research reported in this paper used the Online Learning Environment Survey (OLES) as a tool to evaluate e-learning environments. Data gathered from university classes in Hong Kong using blended e-learning were used to illustrate the value of OLES in helping educators reflect on the online learning environment provided for students. Comments from interviews were used to verify the data gathered online. OLES was found to be a valuable instrument for gathering data to help educators reflect on what had worked or what might be improved in their classes. These educators were also able to see the extent to which the actual experiences of students in the module matched their preferred online learning environment.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]

In recent years, higher education in Hong Kong and Singapore has envisaged unprecedented changes and reforms, which affect significantly the daily lives of academia in addition to the management style of the university. Globalization is manipulated as a rationale for reforms with an aim to cope with the age of fast-changing technology and knowledge-based economy. Meanwhile, globalization embraces several values that prevail among universities, namely: economic rationalism, academic capitalism and corporate managerialism. The university becomes more business-like and enterprise-oriented. Business practices such as performance indicators, benchmarking, quality asurance and control, commercialization of applied research, user-pay principle, market incentives, and diversification of resources are transplanted to the higher education sector.
These phenomena demonstrate a paradigm shift from perceiving the university as a cultural institution to a public service one. Following the Anglo-American experiences of public sector reforms, higher education is similarly required to achieve the goals of "efficiency, effectiveness and economy" in the name of New Public Management (NPM). Smarter and wiser higher education, in terms of resource allocation, emerges at the expense of the traditional ethos of collegiality among academia for institutional decision-making and management. This article examines the impacts of higher education reforms on academe and academia in Hong Kong and Singapore. It is argued that higher education is cloaked by a pessimistic atmosphere, in which academics are pressurized by ever harsher external scrutiny over teaching, research and university administration.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

This study explores the views of mentoring held by mentors, mentees and university teachers in a distance education programme for in-service teacher education offered by the Open University of Hong Kong. Ten pairs of mentors and mentees and three university teachers participated in in-depth individual interviews designed to explore their views of mentoring with respect to five aspects: mentor roles and responsibilities; mentor-mentee relationships; mentoring programmes; mentor preparation; and school-university relationships. The findings show that mentors, mentees and university teachers held different views of mentoring and that the impact of mentoring on the mentees was different from what the University had expected. This study is significant in the following ways. First, it will contribute to a better understanding of mentoring in the context of in-service teacher education. Second, it will provide important information on how different views of mentoring will influence how mentoring is realized. Third, with the proposed teacher registration requirements in Hong Kong that place a heavy emphasis on the role of mentoring during internship, there is a critical need for information on views of mentoring held by different stakeholders to facilitate dialogue with teachers and schools and to build a common vision of mentoring.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

This study examined the interrelationship among achievement goals, study strategies and achievement of 473 students in a Hong Kong tertiary institution by means of questionnaire survey. Correlational analyses showed that performance goal was significantly and positively related to both surface and deep strategies while learning goal was significantly and positively related to deep strategy but negatively related to surface strategy. However there was no significant relation between achievement and goals or achievement and study strategies held by the sample. The results validated the applicability of an adapted instrument developed in western countries to measure achievement goal orientations in the Hong Kong context. It also gave support to the western findings that students who hold learning goals usually adopt a deep approach of study while students who are performance goal orientated tend to be shallow in study approach. Nevertheless, it was interesting to find that achievement was not significantly related to either the goals or study strategies held by students in the sample. The results were in contrast to the usual assumption that students who are performance goal oriented and adopt shallow approach in study would score low in academic achievement. Further investigation would be necessary to verify the effects of these variables on achievement of students.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]