This study investigated the fundamental motor skill proficiency of Hong Kong children ages 6-9. Ninety-one male and 76 female Chinese students (mean age = 7.6 years) from six local primary schools in Hong Kong participated in this study. The Test of Gross Motor Development-Second Edition (TGMD-2) was administrated to assess the mastery of gross motor skills by an experienced physical education instructor. The performance was videotaped, and it was rated by the same physical education instructor again (1 week apart) to show the reliability (0.88-0.97). Results showed that the participants were in general superior to the normative samples from the TGMD-2 manual, scoring a gross motor quotient (GMQ) of 56.8-80.9. Overall, 24% of the participants were rated as superior, 36% as above average, 47% as average, and 2% as below average. Excellent proficiency (>80% in every subitem) was observed in running, galloping, leaping, sliding, catching, and throwing skills. In comparing the results with other studies, we found that the participants were superior to the data reported in previous studies in United States, Brazil, and Australia. This study added valuable information to the establishment of a worldwide normative reference for the comparison of future studies in other countries.
[Copyright of Research in Sports Medicine is the property of Taylor & Francis Inc.. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15438620902897516]

This study aimed to compare the adaptation of two groups of migrant Chinese adolescents with their nonmigrant peers. The migrant adolescents included 55 Chinese migrant adolescents who migrated to Australia (Chinese-Australian) and 111 China-born adolescents who migrated to Hong Kong (Chinese-Hong Kong). The nonmigrant adolescents included 157 Anglo-Australian adolescents residing in Australia and 456 Hong Kong-born Chinese adolescents residing in Hong Kong. There were three research questions in this study. First, would there be any differences in the adaptation of Chinese migrant adolescents in different societies of settlement? Second, would migrant adolescents experience more adaptation problems than nonmigrant adolescents? Third, would there be any differences in the adaptation of adolescents in the two societies, Australia and Hong Kong? It was hypothesized that: (1) mainland Chinese migrant adolescents in Hong Kong would experience more adaptation problems than Chinese migrant adolescents in Australia; (2) migrant adolescents would report better adaptation than nonmigrant adolescents; (3) adolescents in Hong Kong would report poorer adaptation than adolescents in Australia. The participants were requested to complete a questionnaire on various adaptation outcome measures including life satisfaction, self-esteem, psychological symptoms, academic satisfaction, and behaviour problems. The results indicated that Chinese-Australian adolescents reported better psychological adaptation but Chinese-Hong Kong adolescents reported better sociocultural adaptation. Adolescents resident in Australia reported higher psychological adaptation but lower sociocultural adaptation than those in Hong Kong. Migrant adolescents reported better psychological and sociocultural adaptation than their nonmigrant counterparts. The results were discussed in relation to the social and educational systems of the two societies.
[Copyright of International Journal of Psychology is the property

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between learning preferences of East Asian and American higher education students. A review of the literature revealed a body of qualitative studies suggesting a stereotypical perception of an Asian learning preference influenced by cultural variables and the historical roots of Confucianism. The pedagogical implications of this stereotypical perception are obvious to faculty engaged in teaching and learning with Asian international students in America or abroad. The authors surveyed 233 higher education students from Hong Kong and America using the VARK Questionnaire. The authors used a two-way contingency table analysis and chi-square statistical tests to conduct their cross-cultural comparison on their variables of interest including age, gender, and country.
[Copyright of Journal of Criminal Justice Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511250903200485]

In a time of mass schooling in most parts of the world, the discourse of the owoman primary teachero is often the subject of discourse. Yet most stories of these women teachers emerge from other (Western) contexts, with little known about how changing education processes affect the gendered identities of women in other cultural settings. This paper explores how women teachers negotiate their gendered identities in Hong Kong, where modernization has already mingled with the indigenous Chinese culture. It provides the stories of four Chinese women teachers as they engage in ongoing construction and negotiations of gendered identities over their life histories in Hong Kong. All are ethnically Chinese, of different ages and at different stages of their personal and professional lives, and all have grown up in Hong Kong. A framework of post-colonial concepts of hybridity and border crossing helps to suggest how identity resources develop in relation to a range of contemporary practices which are experienced as both pressures and opportunities. These Chinese women teachers' identities are seen to be complex, fluid and multi-faceted, continually under construction in their daily lives, with changes experienced in both work and family settings.
[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/10.1080/02188791003721978]

This study draws upon an ecological perspective to examine parental involvement in homework and its relationship with primary school children's educational outcomes within the Chinese sociocultural context of Hong Kong. Data were collected using homework diaries and questionnaires administered to 1,309 pairs of students and parents spanning all six primary grade levels in 36 primary schools in Hong Kong. Results show that primary children across grade levels devote a substantial amount of time each day after school to homework assignments and revision, while parents' involvement in the homework process varies. Such variation in parental involvement is found to relate to the child's grade level as well as the parent's educational attainment. Gain in children's academic efficacy with higher parental involvement level is observed among junior primary students as well as those with parents of lower educational attainment. Implications for the school's role in involving parents in the homework process are discussed.
[Copyright of School Community Journal is the property of Academic Development Institute.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.adi.org/journal/]

In this paper, I posit a hybrid conceptualisation of women teachers' identities in the globalising and localising negotiation of gender. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridities, this paper argues for a fluid, hybrid and multifaceted reality of women teachers' lives in the areas of family, the husband and wife relationship, and the place of the child in the family as they engage in workplaces. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese women primary school teachers first individually and then in groups of four or five in Hong Kong where globalisation meets with the indigenous Chinese culture. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Gender & Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540250802581834]

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge were uniquely associated with all three concurrently measured literacy skills, as well as longitudinal measures of specific literacy skills. Naming speed was also uniquely associated with concurrent word reading, as well as all three literacy skills longitudinally, even with their autoregressive effects controlled. Analyses of children's spelling mistakes indicated that 97% and 95% of all errors were either morpholexically or orthographically based at times 1 and 2, respectively. Morphologically based spelling errors were also uniquely associated with all three literacy skills across time. Findings underscore the importance of morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese literacy acquisition.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888430903162910]

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine parenting style in the domain of emotion socialization through studying the relationships among parenting styles, emotion-related parental practices, and parental goals of Hong Kong-Chinese mothers. Data were collected from 189 Hong Kong-Chinese mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children. Hong Kong-Chinese mothers reported that among authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles, they adopted an authoritative style most often and an authoritarian style least often. They valued both relational and individualistic emotional competence of their children as parental goals but regarded the former as more important than the latter. Structural equation modeling results indicated that parental goals mediated the influences of parenting styles on parental practices. Authoritative mothers who held individualistic emotional competence goals adopted different parental practices (a coaching or an emotion-encouraging approach) from those who held relational emotional competence goals. When mothers adopted authoritarian parenting and endorsed relational emotional competence as a parental goal, they responded to children's expression of emotions in a dismissing way.
Practice or Policy: Parenting styles play an overarching role in emotion socialization, influencing both parental practices and goals. The results imply that school personnel, counselors, or social workers should take into account parenting styles, parental goals, and cultural values of participants when they offer training programs to parents.
[Copyright of Early Education & Development is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10409280802541973]

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]

Gender differences in creativity scores of the Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests were found for a sample of 2476 4th- to 9th-graders from 8 primary schools and 4 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Specifically, girls in the junior high grades excelled boys in verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness. These findings contrasted with previous findings of no gender differences in a norming study of the same instrument carried out eight years before this study. The gender differences were explained in terms of environmental effect and cultural effect.
[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/10.1080/10400419.2010.481522]