The establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has brought about enormous structural, social, economical, political and cultural changes to society. The government, the public, and other parties concerned find the need to cope with the multi-faceted changes by reviewing the existing systems and policies as to provide information for improvement or reform, wherever necessary. Education is undoubtedly on the reform agenda. Art education, which forms part of the core curriculum of general education and plays a role for developing an all-round being, deserves due attention. This study intends to obtain a thorough picture on the changes of the philosophy and rationale of art education in the past forty years by a descriptive study on the aims of art education in the official art syllabi of junior secondary schools. The study finds that there is a paradigm shift in art education in Hong Kong: from emotional personal experience to the cognitive and affective learning; from a single dimension of educational aims to multi-dimensional; from mere personal development to personal development, socialization, economic productivity, and further learning.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This paper reports a qualitative study of how 4 skilled pre-service physical education teachers, who were attending the final year of a four-year full-time Bachelor of Educaion Degree programme, perceived their learning-to-learn experiences of TGFU. Attached to Lawson's occupational socialisation and interpretive inquiry perspective, data were collected through interviewing and writing of critical incidents. Although all participants perceived TGfU positively as a viable approach of PE instruction contributing to pupils' cognitive development and providing fun, they only regarded their socialization of TGfU experience as pedagogical knowledge in the form of teaching procedures which could map well with the current education reform in Hong Kong. Thus, half of them showed hesitation of adopting the model in their future teaching. They were troubled by the anticipated practicality problems and the impacts of their anticipatory socialization. The inadequacy of "tactical knowledge" of individual games threw them into confusion. They could not be sure whether the games education should be oriented towards "cognitive" or "skill" and whether it should focus on "technical" of "thinking" dimensions. They felt doubtful about whether the learning sequence of games should be from "tactic-to-technique" or from "technique-to-tactic". To such an extent, pre-service PE teachers should be acquainted with in-depth theoretical understanding of TGfU and equipped with tactical skills concerning the games they teach.
[Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

In the Science Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), on e of our prominent research and teaching development areas is the application of information science and related technologies (which consist of scientific and 3D visualization, virtual reality, scientific computation, computer-simulated experiments, datalogging systems for computer-controlled/interfaced experiments as well as the conventional IT elements such as multimedia and Internet) in Science education. We have been applying our project output not only for teaching a thousand of Science or General Studies and non-Science elective student-teachers enrolled in various HKIEd sub-degree and degree level courses, but also for providing value-free knowledge to the public through the Internet (e.g. Hypermedia And Self-learning Centre with website http://www.ied.edu.hk/has) and some in-service teacher training programs. From a teacher educator’s point of view, we will share our expertise/experience in some practical and plausible applications of information science and related technologies for promoting quality teaching and effective learning through a subject-based or subject specific approach with particular reference to the Science education. We shall also discuss some feasible ways of training/upgrading the IT competence of school science teachers through a series of hands-on and minds-on workshops.

In Hong Kong, the Education Commission has presented in 2000 a series of recommendations for reforming the education system. The focus of this paper is on the curriculum reform from which Physical Education (PE) is being affected in the education reform exercise. Highlighted in the analysis is the relationship between the education reform and a critical component of PE, games activities, which play a heavy weighting in the PE curriculum. More importantly, in the last decade, an innovative games teaching approach, Teaching Games for understanding (TGFU), was introduced in Hong Kong and has created a strong impact on Hong Kong PE teachers. The purpose of this paper is to review to what extend this new approach can echo the education reform towards the 21st century. The analysis reveals that the philosophy of TGFU is in line with the new curriculum reform and does contribute greatly to the development of studentsí cognitive experience, particularly problem-solving and decision-making skills as well as enjoyment from which they are highlighted by the Education Commission as generic skills, and value and attitudes components.
[Copyright © 2004 Xunta de Galicia.]