The purpose of this paper is to investigate the aims, content and assessment method of the music curriculum in Hong Kong, with particular emphasis on singing and instrumental playing. How far music teachers followed the guidelines as suggested by the Education Department in these two areas will be dealt with. The methods used for this investigation will be mainly through documentary research, supplemented by interviews with music teachers.

Learning Study, in the form of action research, provides a platform for school-based teacher professional development in Hong Kong. In each Learning Study, teachers of a certain subject in a school work collaboratively with researchers from the Hong Kong Institute of Education to plan and teach a lesson, aiming to achieve some important goals and/or to solve some learning problems in the curriculum of that subject. This presentation is about a Secondary 2 science Learning Study case on the topic “Action and Reaction”. Findings from the pilot interview indicated that the students had quite a lot of misconceptions about “forces” and they had few chances to make scientific reasoning in their science lessons. The object of learning of this Learning Study case was to infer the relationship between action and reaction based on the observations from some linear motion experiments. The presentation reports the whole process in conducting the Learning Study, including the identification of learning difficulties, planning and teaching of the lesson, evaluation of the learning outcomes and reflections from the teachers.

Approaches to teaching art were studied through interviews with 18 art teachers at secondary schools in Hong Kong. Grounded analysis revealed that the approaches to teaching fitted into a four category model with category labels: instructional, discipline inquiry, social interactive, and personal. The categories were defined and described by six dimensional features: aim; content; role of teacher; role of student; teaching methods; and assessment orientation. The four categories of approaches to teaching could be placed under a higher-order spectrum between subject- and student-centred pole This article reports the findings of a study of art teachers’ approaches to teaching art. Before the findings are illustrated, it is necessary to deal with how the term approach to teaching is operationalised and how it relates to other constructs, such as conceptions and beliefs about teaching.

This paper describes, analyses and evaluates changes in teaching methodologies of the English curriculum formally proposed for Hong Kong secondary schools from 1975 to 1998. “Formally proposed” means “stated in written documents produced by agencies with official authority”. Aspects of the formal, or planned curriculum in Hong Kong have been stated in written documents produced by agencies such as the Educational Management Board (EMB) and the Curriculum Development Council (CDC). The documents used for this analysis are the 1975 (provisional) Syllabus for English (Forms 1-5) and the 1983 Syllabus for English (Forms 1-5). In additions, since the current research project falls at a time when another major curriculum renewal process is in process, there will be some extrapolation from the 1997 task-based primary English curriculum to the task-based secondary English curriculum planned for the year 2000. The planned curriculum is examined here as the first step in a larger research project which aims to compare the planned and implemented curriculum of the HK Special Administrative Region and Shanghai. The research question relevant to this paper is: “What are the aims, objectives, teaching methodology and assessment of the English curriculum formally proposed in Hong Kong schools?” The planned curriculum is seen as only one aspect of the process which shapes a curriculum. It is acknowledged that a curriculum plan is like a blueprint for a building which may never be constructed, or may not be constructed as planned, or if constructed may not serve its intended functions (Cornbleth, 1990, p.6). The paper focuses on methodology, while other aspects of the planned curriculum are treated in other papers (forthcoming) produced under the auspices of the project.

This paper reports the key findings of a territory-wide review survey on the current development of Information Technology in Education (ITEd) in Hong Kong. 711 schools in different sectors had taken part in this study. Five areas regarding ITEd were reviewed: (1) IT facilities and accessibility; (2) Resources; (3) IT deployment in schools; (4) IT deployment for learning/teaching; and (5) Students' awareness/competency in use of IT. All schools had basic infrastructure to support the development of ITEd while teachers and students were competent to adopt IT in teaching and learning. The present progress of ITEd has posted a solid foundation for further development which aims at developing 21st century skills.
[Copyright © 2011 Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.]

Teaching Cantonese opera in schools has been advocated by the Hong Kong Government for more than a decade. However, Hong Kong music teachers find teaching Cantonese opera difficult due to their lack of relevant training. Research suggests that Hong Kong music teachers would be modestly confident and competent to teach the genre if a partnership approach is undertaken in which a professional artist collaborates with the teacher in teaching. Nevertheless, what are the problems that music teachers face in such partnership? A group of music teachers comprising six from four primary schools and six from three secondary schools participated in a collaborative teaching project with professional practitioners of Cantonese opera in 2009-10. Each school collaborated with one Cantonese opera artist in teaching a unit within eight weeks. All the classes were videotaped and observed with a focus on any constraints that teachers would face during their teaching. In addition, they were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews for further validating and triangulating the observation by the researcher. Initial findings from the study mainly include the misconception of pedagogy used in teaching the ethnic genre by employing Western music concepts including equal temperament, Bel Canto singing and Western notation system. The impact of using Western music concepts include: a) hindering students’ understanding of the nature of the genre such as the freedom of improvisatory development in life performances; b) hindering understanding of the authentic ‘Hepta-equal temperament’ used in the genre; and c) misleading students that the voice projection method is similar to the one in the Western music. This study identifies the issues raised and warrants discussion and implications of strategies in solving the problems. Initial implications include the need of professional development of both the music teacher and the artist.

A fundamental objective of Hong Kong in the 21st century is a vision of itself as an international cultural metropolis. This sits within a wider culture of change initiated by the comprehensive educational reforms launched in 2000, all aimed at preparing the future workforce for the challenges of the new millennium by encouraging students to take the learning initiative while simultaneously nurturing in them the ability to think and create. At the same time Hong Kong, at both an educational and at a wider, societal level, is a high-stakes, results-based environment generated by a culture of assessment. It is within this context that the article uses Music (through its traditional espousal of cultural values) as a "barometer" of the present climate to report the findings of a survey of Hong Kong secondary students in an attempt to gauge, and consequently articulate, the place of this particular subject within the curriculum. The subsequent confirmation that the cultural aims of the HKSAR are at odds with a mindset which is essentially commercial at heart reveals more than a simple mismatch in 2 terms of drivers: the wider implication that, in real terms, little has effectively changed in the past decade is a finding which clearly has important repercussions. Hinting that a "back to basics" tripartite process of rethinking, reevaluation and reorientation may well be required in order to help ensure that Hong Kong successfully realizes its ongoing policy goals, the article concludes with some suggestions of its own for the various relevant stakeholders.
[Copyright © The Hong Kong Institute of Education].

Immersion education, a variant of content-based instruction, is characterised by the dual curriculum goals of content and language learning. The content and language learning goals become increasingly complex and challenging at the late immersion level. One way to help students achieve these goals is by planning content and language learning objectives that guide the design of content-language integrated learning materials. This article reports how content teachers and an ESL teacher educator in Hong Kong collaborated to design materials to support late immersion students' integrated content-language learning. The learning materials were designed by reference to a pedagogical framework that uses knowledge structures and text structures to link content and language learning objectives. The author presents sample learning materials and explains their design. Student achievements in using the history materials in a collaborative action research project, as well as the students' and the teacher's views of the materials, demonstrate some effectiveness of the design. Challenges to the content-language integration design are discussed.
[Copyright © Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.].

English is an important language in Hong Kong, an international city located on the southern coast of the People's Republic of China that, for over 150 years to 1997, was a British colony. This paper describes and analyses changes in teaching methodologies in the English language curriculum formally proposed for Hong Kong junior secondary schools from 1975 to the present day, to study how the curriculum developments reflect interrelated social, political, economic, and cultural factors of the period and the ideology in educational circles that was pre-eminent at the time. It finds that, while the rhetoric of the curriculum has changed in accordance with shifts in socio-economic conditions, the curriculum content and pedagogical approaches implemented in the classrooms have proved more constant across time. The paper suggests some explanations for the resultant curricula tensions.
[Copyright © Lulu Press Inc.].

Chinese pre-school children perform well in learning mathematics compared with English-speaking children. This study investigates the scenes behind Chinese pre-school Children's mathematics performance using teacher questionnaires and interviews. Results indicated that the Chinese number system appeared to afford advantages to Chinese children in learning individual mathematics concepts but this was not enough to explain why children perform well in other areas. Frequent practice and exposure to mathematics in pre-schools, together with parental support at home might explain why children performed well in mathematics learning. Study results also revealed that although the underpinning philosophy of pre-school curriculum planning in Hong Kong might be similar to some pre-schools in other parts of the world, such as the adoption of integrated curriculum and unstructured play, contradictory practice might also be incorporated. Mathematics teaching in Hong Kong pre-schools mirrors the Chinese cultural aspiration towards learning, and both teachers and parents play an active role in pursuing academic success for each child.
[Copyright © University of Exeter. Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching].