Hong Kong went through a complete reform in its higher education curriculum, incorporating opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and holistic competency development. Almost eight years have passed since the reform, yet little is known about the current state of students' holistic competency development across different disciplines. Students' self-evaluation of their capacities in holistic competencies can provide us indirect evidence of student development of these competencies for quality assurance. This study does not only aim to explore how undergraduates in Hong Kong self-assessed their holistic competencies, but also to identify whether there were disciplinary differences. To do so, 2192 undergraduate students from six universities in Hong Kong were surveyed using the validated Students' Perception of Holistic Competencies Questionnaire. Analysis of the quantitative data revealed that students generally rated themselves strongest in Moral Values but weakest in Interpersonal and Leadership Competencies. However, no substantial mean difference across the different disciplines was evident in all six holistic competencies investigated. The overall results indicated that undergraduates in Hong Kong generally believe that they have a moderately high level of capability in holistic competencies. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier.

Creativity is an important 21st Century skill that enhances students’ ability to see new opportunities, confront new challenges, and adapt flexibly to the changing study, work and life situations. To nurture students with strong self-efficacy in creative thinking is as important as the contexts and strategies involved in its application. But how to develop sustainable interventions (without generating excessive workload for teachers) to promote students’ self-efficacy in creativity is a long-lasting challenge. This study presents a simple and relatively cost-effective instructional intervention, i.e., self-assessment mind maps, and examines its effect on students’ self-efficacy in creativity, self-efficacy in learning English, and academic performance in English language tests. A pretest-posttest non-equivalent design was adopted for the experimental and control groups of students in a Hong Kong primary school in 2021/22 Spring semester. The results show that students from the experimental group significantly outperformed those from the control group on self-efficacy in creativity after the intervention. However, the intervention did not improve students’ self-efficacy and test performance in English learning. The findings demonstrate the potential of self-assessment mind maps as an effective and sustainable instruction intervention to promote students’ higher-order abilities. This study sheds light on designing sustainable instructional strategies for empowerment in creativity. Copyright © 2022 Yan, Lee, Hui and Lao.

This research aimed to develop a short form of the Self-assessment Practices Scale (SaPS). Guided by a process model of self-assessment, the SaPS scale was designed to assess the actions students engage in during the self-assessment process. The data used for developing the original 20-item SaPS (SaPS-20), i.e., 1,416 Hong Kong students ranging from Primary 4 to Secondary 3, were reanalyzed, and a 12-item short form (SaPS-SF) was developed. Factor analysis and Rasch analysis were applied in complementary ways to examine the psychometric properties of the SaPS-SF. The results showed that factor structure of the original scale held in the SaPS-SF, and all items fitted the Rasch model requirements sufficiently and measured the constructs as theorized. The findings presented in this study facilitate the measurement of self-assessment practice in a parsimonious and effective way. Copyright © 2020 Yan.