The evolution of globalisation and ensuing internationalisation of higher education need radical reform of institutional policies and practices to promote education for diversity, equity and inclusion. Extant literature on university/college student persistence/retention witnesses a lack of research on the subjective sense of belonging on campus among ethnic minoritised students who have been historically marginalised in higher education and are now part of the emerging demographic on campus. This study attempted to fill the gap. Engaging qualitative individual interviews with 12 university students of South/Southeast Asian ethnicity in Hong Kong, the purpose of this study was to examine their perceptions and experiences of institutional affiliations and engagement in university. Findings suggested that being connected to the programme and university, and the depth and quality of intragroup dynamics, are key to a sense of belonging among ethnic minority students. Findings also elucidated a lack of cross‐cultural interaction and racial/ethnic diversity within the university environment, which shaped participants’ feelings of isolation and exclusionary experiences as they sought to adjust to the campus academically and socially. The study’s findings could help inform the development and evaluation of institutional strategies that can sustain minoritised students in university transitions and promote institutional connectedness and academic success among all students on campus. Copyright © 2021 British Educational Research Association

Scholars have extensively studied acculturation from different theoretical perspectives among immigrants across the societies of settlement. However, there is a dearth of knowledge about acculturation from a culture learning approach in Hong Kong. This article reports the acculturative challenges among sixteen (16) Pakistani students from six different secondary schools in Hong Kong. The phenomenographic data analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed four categories of everyday experiences in schools that hinder their acculturation. These are mainly related to inter-ethnic interactions, sensitivity towards diverse learning and sociocultural needs, and the Chinese language teaching curriculum for non-Chinese speaking students. Although the study reports Pakistani students' experiences, the findings may also translate the acculturative challenges among students with an immigrant or ethnic minority background in settlement societies. The article also discusses both the theoretical and practical implications for studying and helping immigrant young people in multicultural contexts. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study explored the associations between secondary school students' sense of school belonging, their perceptions of school kindness, and character strength of kindness, and examined possible differences in these constructs across gender groups. The study, which included 1973 Hong Kong secondary school students, revealed that students' sense of school belonging was positively correlated with their perceptions of school kindness at the school and student levels (0.021 and 0.185, respectively). Furthermore, students' sense of school belonging was positively linked to character strength of kindness at the student level, although this relationship was found to be non-significant at the school level. At both levels of analysis, the positive relationships between students' perceptions of school kindness and character strength of kindness were significant. In addition, girls reported higher levels of character strength of kindness than boys. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the relationships between sense of school belonging, school kindness, and character strength of kindness. Implications for research are also discussed. Copyright © 2020 Society for the Study of School Psychology.

Declining employment prospects of graduates have been reported in the international literature and in Hong Kong. This casts doubts on the ‘employability’ of graduates of an expanding higher education sector. Yet, published patterns and trends of graduate employment outcomes do not tell us much about the contextualised processes that ‘match’ or ‘mismatch’ graduates’ qualifications with ‘appropriate’ graduate jobs. This paper addresses this research gap through examining lived experience and subjectivities of college/university-to-work transition of 10 graduates of self-financing degree-awarding institutions in Hong Kong, which were derived from a study of 40 local young workers in 2018. Drawing upon ‘positioning’ and ‘processual’ perspectives on ‘employability’, this paper sheds light on the nebulous, mutually constituted nature of the skills demanded by employers in workplace. Also, highlighting the tensions discerned in interview narratives, it elucidates the difficulties for graduates to present their skills as ‘directly’ transferable to the workplace. Graduates’ interpretations of (their) ‘employability’ reveal the differential values attached to (‘technical’ vs. ‘non-technical’) skills, (degree vs. sub-degree) qualifications and (self-financing vs. publicly funded) institutions constructed in the specific context of local higher education development. Implications for further research, assessment of higher education functioning and career services are discussed. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Background: Childhood obesity is a serious health problem that may affect children until their adulthood. Prevalence of childhood obesity found in Hong Kong has increased significantly. Childhood obesity is believed to be to associate with unhealthy behaviour; therefore, different programs have been conducted previously to promote healthy lifestyle behaviour. So far, the effectiveness of these programs is still controversial. As a parent is an agent having great impact on children, the purpose of the present study was to design a parent-based childhood obesity program, and the effectiveness of this program was assessed.Methods: Design: A randomized, controlled trial, including pre- and post-intervention assessment to examine the effects of a comprehensive intervention program comparing the control condition of a parent’s self-efficacy in managing problem behaviour of children.Subjects: 128 pairs of primary school students and parents in Hong Kong were recruited to participate in a “Healthy for Life” program.Duration: The 20-week program included 10 weeks of intervention and a maintenance period of 10 weeks.Intervention: Participants were randomly divided into an intervention group (n=62) and a control group (n=54). In the intervention group, parents were given education on health knowledge, information on childhood obesity and parenting skills strategies for managing obesity-related problem behaviour of children. In addition, they received a health information sheet nine times during the intervention period. Parents were recommended to use such knowledge and skills to control the body weight of children through modifying children’s unhealthy lifestyle behaviour in the intervention period. In the control group, parents received several health information sheets during the intervention period only.Outcome measures: Parents were asked to complete the “Lifestyle Behaviour Checklist” to assess the problem level and their confidence level in managing the child’s behaviour.

Access to private tutoring, or shadow education, significantly contributes to the increasing disparities in the attainment of language learners from different family backgrounds worldwide. In ESL/EFL contexts, many students subscribe to English private tutoring (EPT) in hopes of getting good English results in high-stakes examinations to secure a university place. This longitudinal narrative inquiry investigates the experiences of a financially disadvantaged student who managed to pay the tuition to subscribe to an EPT class in Hong Kong. Multiple sources of data collected throughout the year from six rounds of in-depth interviews with the student; three reflective essays; classroom observations and interviews with the student's tutor, schoolteacher and parent yielded thick description of the student's narrative. Informed by Norton Pierce's notion of investment, the analysis reveals how the participant invested in EPT to overcome existing educational inequalities. The tutorial class was perceived by the student as a place to expand her social network with students from prestigious schools, with a hope to ultimately gain the economic capital for escaping poverty. This study has implications regarding the effects of inequalities of educational opportunities in affluent societies. It indicates the need for further research on language learners' experiences in the shadow education context. Copyright ©Routledge.

Viewed through the lens of narrative inquiry, this study explored the doctoral experiences of a language teacher educator and examined how he constructed and reconstructed his identities through learning and research experiences in the higher education environment of Hong Kong. Grounded in the notions of "communities of practice" while using "identity" as an analytic lens, the present study examined how a doctoral student negotiated his participation and membership in his situated academic community. The case study provides in-depth understanding of major challenges for a doctoral student to negotiate competence, identities, and power relations in the academic community. These dimensions were vital to gain recognition as a legitimate old-timer in an academic community. A sense of agency was necessary to cross boundaries and shape his own learning and participation in the academic community. However, identity construction is complex in nature, influenced not only by situated experiences within an institutional setting, but also a broader societal academic community. Pedagogical implications for doctoral education were discussed. Copyright ©Routledge.

The Active Healthy Kids 2019 Hong Kong Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth with Special Educational Needs (SEN) provides evidence-based assessments for nine indicators of physical activity behaviors and related sources of influence for 6- to 17-year-olds with SEN in Hong Kong. This is the first Report Card for this population group in Hong Kong. The best available data between 2008 and 2019 were reviewed by a panel of experts. Following the Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance (AHKGA) development process, letter grades were assigned to nine indicators (Overall Physical Activity, Organized Sport Participation, Active Play, Active Transportation, Sedentary Behaviors, Family & Peers, School, Community & Environment, and Government Strategies & Investments). Two behavior indicators (Overall Physical Activity: F; Sedentary Behaviors: D+) and two contextual indicators (School: B; Government Strategies & Investments: C-) were assigned a letter grade. The remaining indicators including Organized Sport Participation, Active Play, Active Transportation, Family & Peers, and Community & Environment were not graded due to insufficient data. A majority of children and youth with SEN in Hong Kong are physically inactive and have a high level of sedentary behaviors. Schools are ideal settings to promote physical activity for this population. There is a need to develop a comprehensive surveillance system to monitor this population, assess efforts to improve the grades, and promote physical activity opportunities for children and youth with SEN. Copyright ©Elsevier (Singapore) Pte Ltd.

Organized extracurricular activities (EAs) are an important component of the microsystem that impacts children's lives. Previous literature has primarily focused on school-aged children and youth in Western societies. This study utilized a longitudinal design and examined the antecedents and consequences of extracurricular participation in a sample of 194 Hong Kong Chinese preschoolers. The results showed that higher family socioeconomic status (SES) predicted higher levels of participation in EAs (e.g., attendance intensity and the breadth of participation). Children from higher-SES families were more likely to involve in non-academic-oriented EAs. Participation in EAs was generally associated with the growth trajectories of reading and math skills in children from less advantaged SES backgrounds, but not higher-SES children. In contrast, EA participation was not associated with children's social skills. Findings highlight the importance of examining the relationship between EA participation and children's early development in non-Western societies. Copyright ©Elsevier Ltd.

Post-secondary admission and community college (CC) transfer are two common routes of entry to baccalaureate study. Previous studies comparing the academic performances of native and transfer students have generated inconsistent findings and, furthermore, they were largely conducted in Western educational contexts. This study compared the workloads, grade point averages (GPA) and attrition rates of native and transfer students in an Asian educational context. Various measures related to GPA, credit load and attrition rate were collected from the institutional dataset of a Hong Kong university in 2019; this dataset contained records of 14,141 native students and 7308 transfer students enrolled between 2012 and 2018. Results show that the transfer students experienced transfer shock and had heavier study loads but lighter non-academic loads than the native students. Despite the transfer shock, they attained a higher award GPA and had a lower attrition rate than their native counterparts. Discussion and implications are presented, in relation to transfer shock and transfer student success. In particular, this article argues that CC education does not necessarily produce academically inferior degree-seeking students and that CC transfer is a viable pathway to baccalaureate study.
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