The dominance of Asian communities in international league tables such as those produced by The Program for International Student Assessment, which monitors competence in literacy and numeracy, has resulted in a policy discourse from the English government of failing schools, deficit curricular and ineffective teachers. This in turn has led to a re-defining of the National Curriculum framework for pupils educated in England with greater focus given in the Early Years curriculum to Mathematical functions particularly those associated with skills in counting; understanding and using number; calculating simple addition and subtraction problems and the understanding of shape, space and measure. Drawing on research carried out in Hong Kong and England this article offers a cross-cultural comparison of the expectations of Early Years Teachers in terms of the capabilities of early learners in achieving elements of number competency. The study of teachers’ expectation is a neglected field in research when applied to compare intercultural achievement. In identifying divergent national expectations, the current panic over what constitutes an appropriate maths curriculum is critiqued and recommendations made for further exploration into teachers’ expectations as to the age and stage at which elements of the maths curriculum are introduced in English schools.
[Copyright © 2016 ASPE.]

This study set out to use phenomenography as a theoretical framework to investigate teaching in classrooms, focusing on how the same content is enacted differently in different teaching activities. We observed teaching activities intended to teach children to recognize Chinese characters in preschools and collected data about the delivery of the teaching activities. A total of 3 categories of teaching activities were identified from the data, which correspondingly reflected 3 ways of seeing the recognition of characters: (A) recognition as matching items, (B) recognition as imitating behaviors, and (C) recognition as constructing meanings. Our results were useful for fostering the professional learning of teachers in practical ways as well as holding the potential to further advance the methodology of phenomenography.
[Copyright © 2016 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research.]

The DG has prepared a questionnaire to collect data of teachers' practise in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea. The results, together with the literature search in theory and practice in mathematics education was prepared into a booklet of 90 pages for discussion during the ICME-12. There were two sessions of discussion during the ICME-12 and the following is a report of work and discussion of the DG during the ICME-12.

English is an important foreign language for children in Asia. In certain economies specializing in international trade (e.g., Hong Kong), parents have high expectations on their preschoolers’ English proficiency. Since instruction time for English in preschools is often limited in these societies (20 to 25 minutes per day, 3 to 5 times a day), school principals sometimes have difficulty deciding how the best teachers of English should utilize the time in their English lessons in order to maximize children’s language development. In this study, I compared three types of preschool English lessons: story-telling, arts and craft, and phonics lessons in order to understand the teacher’s use of the language. In particular, I am interested in the number of times teachers repeat vocabularies and the complexity of the sentences used (as indexed by the type-token ratio and mean length of utterance respectively). The idea is that the type of lessons which affords the richest use of language (i.e., where words are repeated and used in lengthier sentences) is likely to stimulate children’s oral language development, which serves as the foundation for children’s future literacy development. An analysis of six 25-minute English lessons revealed that teachers were less likely to repeat words and more likely to use shorter sentences in phonics lessons in comparison to other lesson types. The implication is that for preschools in which English exposure time is limited, a predominance of phonics lessons (e.g., two out of three lessons in a week) might be detrimental to young children’s oral language development.

The aim of the survey was to examine the attitudes of general primary PE teachers toward integrated PE and the relationships of gender, teaching experience, and class size. Eighty three teachers participated in the survey. The results indicated a neutral attitude towards integrated PE by teachers. There was a significant difference between male and female teachers in their perception of whether "students with disabilities like my teaching" (p = 0.018), but no significant differences with other attitudes by gender. There was a significant difference between teachers' teaching experiences and their perceptions of whether "Little support offered to integrated PE" (p = 0.006), however, no significant differences with other items by experience. There was also a relationship between perceived teaching competency and class size (p < 0.001, r = 0.454). The results were mainly discussed in relation to teaching competency, support, teaching experience and class size.
[Copyright © 2012 Hong Kong Baptist University.]

In major curriculum reforms, there are inevitably gaps between design and implementation issues, taking the introduction of liberal studies (LS) into the senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong as a classic example. The current paper illustrates how the implementation of LS as a compulsory core subject has impacted noticeably on Hong Kong senior secondary education. The LS curriculum setup is somewhat different from traditional subjects due to both the interdisciplinary nature of its design and the conceptions of learning, teaching, and assessment. The current study therefore attempts to portray the delicate balance that exists between the desirability ans feasibility of LS curriculum reform through interviewing members of the working group on the review of the academic structure for senior secondary education and interface with higher education. The study reports that, while LS policy makers considered both desirability and feasibility angles of the LS curriculum in their initial planning, the implementation of the LS public examination and teacher training to support the radical curriculum innovation fell short of expectations. Findings in the study clearly indicate that much more should be taken into account in respect of the dominance of an examination culture as well as teachers’ professional development when making major curriculum design changes.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.]

An interdisciplinary subject, liberal studies, was introduced as a compulsory and core subject into the New Senior Secondary Curriculum in Hong Kong in 2009 with the purpose of expanding students’ knowledge base and increasing their social awareness through investigation into a variety of issues. However, transforming curricular innovations into real classroom settings and maintaining them is a complicated process. This study aimed to investigate, during its first round of implementation, teachers’ pedagogical practices in 21 local schools through in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. The results reveal that the school administrators and teachers were more likely to adapt their teaching approaches and teaching materials than their teaching content and assessment. Both good practices and examination-oriented practices in the process of curriculum implementation were evident in this study. These findings contribute to our understanding of the implementation of an interdisciplinary curriculum in examination-oriented systems and inform the practitioners of school-based practices of curriculum implementation.
[Copyright © 2016 De La Salle University.]

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of creative understanding, this paper aims to investigate children’s creative learning of drama education in a group of preschoolers aged 4–5 in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The research was designed originally to offer a case study to identify the emergence of creative learning during and after drama lessons, and investigate its relation to teaching. The field observations, however, noticed the contrary effect brought by a product-oriented and a teacher-centred approach of teaching. These approaches had strongly undermined the stimulus to imaginative and playful participation that drama education is able to generate purportedly. Not only had they restricted dialogic encounters in the lessons but also the feasibility of identifying children’s creative response emerging from within. These observations led to a shift of the study focus to the method and data of draw-and-tell, which was used to enable children to creatively re-imagine and retell their drama experiences as a concluding reflection. The findings were analysed in three categories, namely Characterization, Re-conceptualization and Transformation to illustrate children’s capacity and techniques of restorying drama experiences with their interest, knowledge, language and culture. The research process as well as the results of the study reveal a complex interplay between teaching, learning and researching affirming that a particular type of creative learning of drama education is not only shaped by a particular form of teaching, but also the research method.
[Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.]