Information technology (IT) is changing the global economy and has brought many changes in all aspects of life. IT is now being used extensively throughout the world for collecting information, constructing knowledge, distance and flexible learning, online communication and global collaboration for lifelong learning and work. To ensure that students are equipped with necessary skills in a digital and information age, the Hong Kong government has provided several documents to help schools plan for the integration of information technology into the school curriculum; with the aims to improve teaching and learning and to produce students who are confident, creative, independent and life-long learners. The paper begins by reviewing the benefits of integration of IT in education. It focuses on the use of IT in teaching and learning in Hong Kong after the introduction of the five-year strategy in 1998. In order to generate further discussion and development in the integration of IT in Home Economics, the usage of IT in the teaching of Home Economics will be explored and discussed. This will form the basis for a larger scale study to investigate how IT can be used in Home Economics to enhance teaching and learning.

With the surging demands for the use of network-based learning environment in primary and secondary schools, the knowledge and practical skills on school LAN management is increasingly critical for our pre-service and in-service IT teachers. Many of our IT graduates will assume the role of IT coordinators in their employed schools on top of their regular teaching duties. Training on network concepts and hands-on communication skills are essential to them. In this paper, we describe our model LAN project for teaching and learning. The model LAN stimulates a school¡¦s networking environment so that our student teachers can acquire the relevant knowledge and practical skills very close to the real school networking environment.

Numerous educational change and school reforms have been conducted to pursue educational effectiveness and educational quality in different parts of the world. Unfortunately, most of the past educational reforms with focus on fragmentary improvement and remedial treatment are not sufficient to bring holistic school development and long term effectiveness, and inevitably many of them have experienced serious frustration if not failure. This paper aims to propose a new direction including ten important tendencies for ongoing and future educational reform and school reengineering in Hong Kong and international contexts. The tendencies are: (1) Towards multiple school functions from simplistic purposes; (2) Towards school autonomy and self-initiative through school-based management; (3) Towards school healthy functioning through a knowledge-based profile; (4) Towards school continuous learning and development through strategic management; (5) Towards human initiative through multi-level self management in school; (6) Towards school multiple effectiveness through a dynamic process; (7) Towards holistic education in school through layer management; (8) Towards synergy and effectiveness through congruence in school; (9) Towards total home-school collaboration and community support for resources, ideas, and legitimacy; (10) Towards school driving force through transformational leadership. The educational reforms in this new direction can support schools to facilitate continuous development of students and staff, increase support of parents and community, improve technology in education and management, and pursue multiple functions more effectively at different levels of our society. Hopefully, all those concerned particularly our students and teachers can benefit from the coming educational reforms.

This paper will present why and what transformational leadership is needed to pursue school effectiveness and development in the rapidly changing education environment and in the coming new century. First, the challenges to school leadership and the need for new leadership will be discussed in the light of the pursuit of multiple school effectiveness and the worldwide educational reform trends. Based on the recent research on principals' leadership in Hong Kong schools, some important insights will be drawn for leadership development and school development particularly in both local context and international contexts. Then the paper will illustrate the shifts of leadership concepts and explain why transformational leadership is do critical to meeting educational challenges in the changing environment. The conception of transformational leadership and its relationship to school-based management, strategic management, and school effectiveness will be illustrated and explained. Finally, a number of implications will be proposed for school principals to practice transformational leadership and achieve long-term and multiple school effectiveness. Establishing a principal centre for leadership learning and development will be a major direction.

Each year in Hong Kong, only about 50% of Secondary Five students (age 16+) can pass the Hong Kong Certificate of Education (HKCEE), which is the threshold qualification for any further pursuit of education or employment. There has been concern for those who did not survive conventional schooling. Recent studies on education have increasingly emphasized life-long learning in the community. For students to be able to continue learning throughout their life, the development of appropriate generic skills is believed to be vital. An innovative continuing education programme known as Project Yi Jin (PYJ) was introduced by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government for those students who failed in the HKCEE. PYJ provides an alternative pathway for students to obtain a formal qualification equivalent to HKCEE. Instead of using the mainstream curriculum for secondary school, PYJ adopts a holistic approach in curriculum design, aiming at developing students’ generic skills. It is expected that students will acquire and develop certain skills that are generic enough to enable them to cope with personal, social and career development. A total of 2,806 students who attended PYJ responded to 13 survey items about their generic skills before PYJ (Time 1) and 13 parallel items after PYJ (Time 2). Principal components analysis found three dimensions of generic skills, viz., Cognitive, Academic, and Affective dimensions before PYJ and three parallel dimensions after PYJ. Repeated-measures analysis of variance found that the students scored significantly higher in each of the three dimensions in Time 2 than in Time 1. There was evidence of enhanced generic skills through PYJ. Whereas there was support for the effectiveness of PYJ, the findings also call for attention to the importance of generic skills in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools.

This paper describes the outcome of a science school-based curriculum development project, a collaboration between the Hong Kong Institute of Education and four secondary schools. The project was an attempt to promote the development of science investigation skills among secondary students. The aim of the project was (i) to try out the strategies proposed, and (ii) to find out from the students after their participation their interest, their perceived difficulty and ways to solve problems encountered in conducting science investigations. This paper describes the various phases of the school-based curriculum development project including the planning, implementation and evaluation of the project. To formulate effective strategies to develop science investigation tasks, a questionnaire was administered to collect feedback from the students. The findings of the project provide evidence that there were positive influences on students' interest in learning science. The responses from the students suggested that they have a higher level of interest in learning science and in participating in measuring or observing results, and planning science investigations. They perceived themselves having more difficulties in the identification of a problem for investigation, writing hypothesis and designing an investigation. More than half of the students also reported not having sufficient knowledge and time in completing the science investigation project. Finally, drawing on the findings, the paper introduces ways of improving the strategies to support science investigations and a two staged model for planning science investigation tasks.

Hong Kong has embarked on a raft of educational reforms and prominent amongst them is a call for school students to 'learn to learn' so they can be lifelong learners. Such a reform direction is common in many countries as the demands of knowledge economies become increasingly clear and politicized. However, the extent to which such a goal is achievable depends significantly on the nature of the school and classroom learning environments in which students and teachers participate. This paper argues that many of the conditions necessary for developing metacognition, an essential requirement for 'learning to learn' and lifelong learning, are still lacking in relation to the context of science education in Hong Kong. It suggests reform directions that, if implemented, would positively impact on school and classroom learning environments and increase the possibilty that 'learning to learn' and lifelong learning might rise above the rhetoric of reform in Hong Kong.