There will almost always be a number of students who are reluctant to actively contribute in face-to-face learning situations because they are shy or are culturally concerned about potential loss of face. Audience Response Systems (ARS) are part of a technology that, principally through its feature of anonymity, offers the opportunity for all students to safely contribute in face-to-face learning situations via individual keypads. Greater feedback from a group of learners poses benefits for both learner and teacher. For the teacher it can help identify areas where student understanding may be weak or incorrect and thus allow appropriate feedback to be applied. For the learner it allows them to see how fellow students are coping and to gauge their own relative performance. This paper reports on the use of an ARS with a group of students in Hong Kong studying a second year undergraduate decision support course. The ARS was used to provide process support for a revision session that explored decision support systems (DSS) and decision making and also to gather some details about the students as a population of learners.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]

The relationship between explanatory style and self-perceived posttraumatic growth was examined among 105 undergraduates in Hong Kong who had experienced bereavement in the past 6 years. Individuals who tended to attribute positive events to internal, global, and stable factors reported more posttraumatic growth than individuals who tended to attribute positive events to external, specific, and unstable factors. The explanatory style for positive events might affect later cognitive processing, such as meaning making after bereavement, which will affect self-perceived posttraumatic growth. One's explanatory style for negative events is not related to posttraumatic growth after bereavement. Directions for future study are described.
[Copyright of Death studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07481180801974760]

Students in the Physiotherapy Programme carried out a group project in their final year of studies. The objectives of the project were that the students learn and appreciate the process and activities involved in research, acquire deeper understanding of a topic in their professional interest, learn to work as a team, manage their own time, collaborate with others and produce a meaningful report. In the case of group work, usually the written report is assessed and the same mark is given to all members. Sometimes the supervisors' and group members' assessment of the members' involvement and participation in the project, oral presentation or viva voce contributes a small portion to the final grade of each student. This practice is limited to the assessment of the outcome of the group effort and does not reflect the process of learning by individual members. Portfolio assessment of learning involves the students themselves reflecting on and evaluating their learning and also allows teachers to evaluate individual students' learning in group tasks. In this paper, the implementation of the portfolio assessment, the criteria for the assessment of the portfolios and the students' opinions on the portfolio assessment are discussed.
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The relationship between thinking styles and personality types is investigated within the contexts of Sternberg's theory of mental self-government and Holland's theory of personality types. A total of 600 university students from Hong Kong responded to the Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI) and the Short-version Self-directed Search (SVSDS) that was specially designed for the present study. A major finding of this study is that thinking styles and personality types overlap to a degree. A secondary finding is that the SVSDS is sufficiently reliable and valid for assessing Holland's personality types. Implications of both findings are discussed.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713663742]

A case study of an undergraduate Educational Psychology course that incorporated both constructivist and teacher-centred teaching was conducted. The learning processes and higher-level learning outcomes were examined through participant observation, interviews with students and analyses of student assignments. The lessons were audio recorded and transcribed, and a total of 68 interviews, each about 1.5 hours long, were conducted. In general, the constructivist teaching facilitated students' creation of their own knowledge, as they were allowed to think more over the problems together and generate original ideas. Students' performances in recalling, critiquing and generating with the knowledge gained in the constructivist teaching context were also better than those in the teacher-centred context. This could be explained by the deeper processing of the material, the activation of students' prior knowledge and the similarity between the situations of knowledge construction and knowledge application. The strengths and limitations of constructivist teaching are also discussed.
[Copyright of Innovations in Education & Teaching International is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703290600750861 ]