The Hong Kong Institute of Education is offering a Three-year Full-time Certificate in Education Course (Primary Education) and an In-service Course of Training for Teachers in Primary Schools. Because the latter course has a fewer course hours than the former course, there is a notion in the Institute of lengthening the latter course in order to upgrade it into a Certificate in Primary Education (Part-time) Course. The author is interested to compare the Final-year trainees in these two courses on their Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Science Teaching, hoping that it would activate the comparative studies on some other aspects of these two courses to see if the findings would support the above-mentioned notion to upgrade the latter course. An instrument HKSTEBI was generated to measure the construct of Science teaching efficacy beliefs. It was found that there is no significant difference between the two cohorts of trainees in the above-mentioned course.

Internet resources are useful for teachers, but few people pay attention to assisting primary mathematics teachers to find relevant resources via Internet. Although a general search engine can help us locate related curriculum resources on the Internet, it is very time-consuming to inspect every possible web sites. The major purpose of this paper is to describe a potential vortal site for helping primary mathematics teachers to search useful teaching resources effectively via linking relevant web sites. This paper attempts to describe the rationales of developing this vortal site. Hence some important principles for designing vortal site are recommended for readers' reference.

The 1997 handover created demands for teaching Chinese culture at and above college level, including those being trained to be teachers. There have been debates on Chinese culture texts and relevant parts of the up-coming high school liberal studies syllabus. The criticisms reflect worries about indoctrinating patriotism and occasionally, losing the right to interpret Chinese culture to the national political centre. While using international scholarship in anthropology and other disciplines might answer some of these concerns, "internationalizing" alone does not help foster participation in interpreting Chinese culture or build a sense of community with alternative voices in the mainland. This paper describes attempts to introduce the work of mainland scholars in anthropology and other disciplines which transcend the tradition-versus-modernity and Chinese-versus-foreign dichotomies. As many of those authors do some of their writings for the mainland reading public, address current issues in mainland China, and often are concerned about empowerment through understanding marginalized traditions, the inclusion of more of their work in teaching Chinese culture in Hong Kong could help nurture "non-official" concepts of being Chinese without opting out of a sense of community that can benefit many on either side of the Hong Kong – mainland divide.

In the era of education reform in Hong Kong, in various government documents, different concepts and functions of assessment were introduced to the community (Education Commission, Sept, 2000; Curriculum Development Council, 2001). Assessment is proclaimed as an integral part of the education process. Formative assessment is stressed as a way to improve teaching and the learning of pupils. It takes place in the classrooms, and provides short term feedback to teachers so that learners' strengths and weaknesses in relation to their progression can be identified. Then teachers can use the feedback in planning what to do nest in order to enhance learning and to promote teaching effectiveness (Black, 1993). Thus, in the lessons, teachers can provide pupils with various learning activities in line with the inquiry approach, have more interaction with the pupils, and carry out different assessment tasks to evaluate individual pupils' knowledge and understanding, skills, as well as values and attitudes (Curriculum Development Council, 2002). The aim of this paper is to study the student teachers' implementation of formative assessment in local primary school classrooms. It is hoped that the present study will provide some insight for the practicing teachers when they plan to conduct formative assessment in General Studies lessons in order to enhance the learning of the pupils and promote the effectiveness of their own teaching. In response to the education reform, the researcher invited fifteen student teachers of the Postgraduate Diploma of Education (Full-time)(Primary) Programme to be co-researchers of the present study. They were to implement formative assessment in General Studies lessons during their teaching practice. They collected data and reflected on the implementation of formative assessment practice in their classroom teaching by writing weekly reflection reports, videotaping a lesson, interviewing their pupils and being interviewed by the researcher. When preparing

Since 2000, the Hong Kong Government has launched a series of education reform measures. Formative assessment is advocated as one of the measures to promote student learning and teaching effectiveness. The paper studied the implementation of formative assessment in General Studies classrooms by the student teachers during their teaching practice in local primary schools. The methodology included inviting the student teachers to be co-researchers, their writing weekly reflection reports, videotaping lessons, interview their students, and being interviewed by the researcher. Findings show that this educational measure cannot be implemented successfully by individual teacher. In order to implement authentic formative assessment, there should be educational change of the whole subject department, supported by the principal, school administration, parents and students.