There has been much recent attention on psychological well-being and pastoral care for medical students. This study examines psychological morbidity (depression, anxiety and stress) in Hong Kong medical students, as well as their concerns, coping mechanisms and their help-seeking. Medical students in Hong Kong reported a higher level of psychological morbidity as compared with other tertiary education students. Their main concerns include examinations, stress, career, adjusting to the new medical curriculum and commitment to the course. The coping skills adopted were largely adaptive. Maladaptive coping skills like `denial', `self-blame' and `behavioural disengagement' were highly correlated with depression, anxiety and stress scores. Most of the students concerned wanted support services that were specifically tailored to their needs and at least partly provided by people who had been through medical training themselves. The faculty at the University of Hong Kong is establishing a Programme for Effective Transition and Student Support (PETSS) to provide a multi- faceted support system for its medical students. The findings in this study help to ensure that the services provided will be relevant, accessible and acceptable to the students.
[Copyright of Medical Teacher is the property of Informa Healthcare . Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01421590500237945]

Our main concern is to see if cultural studies can intervene more productively in the dominant educational processes, in ways that align with the sustainable interests of its critical project. As cynicism becomes the commonplace 'distinction' of our young graduates, we raise two questions: why should cultural studies be concerned with the spread of cynicism within our own institutional and pedagogic space? And what would be the implications of such critical reflection on our current practices, as scholar and teacher of this critical project? The paper draws on our continual engagement with the curriculum reform of secondary school subjects (Integrated Humanities and Liberal Studies) in Hong Kong, in an attempt to explore the limits and opportunities of education as social practice, as well as the effectivity of cultural studies within the contemporary contexts and crises of education. First we describe how taking part in the specific school reform projects has begun to change the critical and pedagogic orientation of cultural studies we do at the university. Then we discuss the implications of our recent experiments in doing cultural studies in and with the local schools. In all, we want to examine what brings us to our own search for a certain 'politics of hope', by re-thinking and re-mapping cultural studies as a collective, pragmatic programme in the local educational set-up. For, without a constructive pragmatics, the students of cultural studies cannot be expected to work effectively across diverse institutional settings. Thus, criticism and the production of critical knowledge in the contemporary academy would go on to foster a state of cynicism among its graduates and the 'stakeholders' concerned. Cultural studies, we believe, can make itself more useful through concrete ways of mediating its expertise in the complex processes of education. As such, we emphasize the contemporary relevance and uses of cultural studies for educational transformation.
[Copyright

Conceptions of learning and preferred learning approaches have been suggested to vary cross-culturally. The extent to which learning is 'student-centred' or 'teacher-centred' also appears subject to cultural variation. This has led some to conclude that particular cultures exhibit learning preferences more suited to distance learning than do other cultures. This article examines the strategies that students from varying cultural backgrounds use to manage the experience of the isolation of distance learning. Two distinct isolation experiences emerge that reflect differences in the perceptions of the student-teacher relationship. These, it is argued, can be classified as a 'surrogate teacher' model in the Asian cultures of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia and a 'student identity' model in Europe.
[Copyright of Open Learning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268051032000131035]

Singapore and Hong Kong are vying to be the principal educational hub for the Asia-Pacific region and have begun to compete with Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA in providing cross-border education. Although these four Anglo-American countries still dominate cross-border education, Singapore and Hong Kong hope to make inroads into this export market and compete on the global stage. To create "world-class" universities, Singapore and Hong Kong have introduced quality assurance mechanisms, diversified funding sources, and restructured their university governance systems. This article compares the accountability measures introduced into Hong Kong and Singapore universities, and the responses of academics and administrators to these measures. The results indicate that both countries introduced greater autonomy as they augmented accountability for their universities, and the term "decentralised centralism" describes the kind of government control exerted in these Asian universities in the twenty-first century.
[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/10.1080/02188790701845972]

This paper discusses the concept of 'cultural cross‐currents,' their implicit nature and the potential they have to effect second language literacy learning, teaching and curriculum reform in Hong Kong primary classrooms. Despite the substantive implications for learning, the exploration of cultural influences upon teacher and student thinking and the resultant educational consequences, remains a largely unrecognized area. The central argument in the paper is that cultural differences in attitudes, beliefs and values of cultural groups toward the way first and second languages are acquired needs to be made explicit in order to facilitate second language literacy teaching and learning.
[Copyright of Intercultural Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14675980600693947]