Special education is necessarily an integral part of universal basic education. Therefore special education has seen substantial development in the past decade in most Chinese societies, which have all accomplished remarkable degrees of universal basic education. However, developing special education, by fundamental principles, is based on the needs of the individual children. Such principles are rather foreign to Chinese education systems which assume that individuals should submit themselves to community needs, and education is the very means to realise such an assumption. Nonetheless, special education also assumes that barriers to learning caused by innate disabilities could be overcome by efforts, but this is very much also basic to the values of education in Chinese societies. This short paper purports to illustrate the interplay between special education and the traditional education values in Chinese societies. Copyright by Special Education Society of Hong Kong Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Bullying is a common aggressive behanviour and a hidden issue in special schools. Maladaptive family backgrounds breed bullies and victims. The characteristics and myths of bullying are discussed. A multi-level approach of school intervention is suggested. Local research on this area is desperately required. Copyright by Special Education Society of Hong Kong Limited. All Rights Reserved.

The present study investigated the executive functioning of working memory, inhibition, shifting, and planning in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and how they related to Chinese (L1) and English (L2) reading comprehension. Fifty-seven Hong Kong Chinese students at Grade 7 were compared with 57 typically developing readers of chronological-age-matched controls on their performance on working memory, inhibition, shifting, planning, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, and reading comprehension in Chinese and English. Results from the multivariate analysis of variance showed that readers with dyslexia performed worse than the typical readers in executive functioning, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, and reading comprehension. Hierarchical regressions indicated that working memory, inhibition, and vocabulary knowledge were significant predictors of reading comprehension in L1 after controlling for age, IQ, and group membership. Furthermore, working memory, inhibition, shifting, vocabulary knowledge, and rapid naming contributed uniquely to reading comprehension in L2. Taken together, these findings suggest executive functioning difficulties in Chinese readers with dyslexia and highlight the differential contributions of executive functioning to Chinese and English reading comprehension; working memory and inhibition appear to play an important role in reading comprehension across different languages. Copyright ©Springer Netherlands.

The development and implementation of regular Spring, Summer, and Winter Gifted Enrichment Programs, Gifted Students Exchange Programs, and the Gifted Peer Mentoring Scheme provided by the Program for the Gifted and Talented (PGT) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for gifted and talented students are briefly described. PGT also conducts research to advance the knowledge of gifted education and talent development and furthers the development of its gifted education provisions based on evidence-based information from research. Specifically, PGT does research on the assessment of giftedness and the special needs of local gifted and talented learners and conducts evaluation on gifted enrichment programs, course design and instruction, and students' performance. The uniqueness of PGT, future directions in the development of university-based gifted programs, and program evaluation research in gifted education in Hong Kong are discussed. Copyright ©Sage Publications Ltd.

This study examined the relation between Theory of Mind (ToM) and reading comprehension in 42 7- to 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children with autism and 55 typically developing peers (TD) who were comparable in age, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Relative to their TD peers, children with autism exhibited difficulties with reading comprehension and advanced ToM tasks, but not word reading and basic ToM tasks. After controlling for nonverbal intelligence, working memory, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge, ToM partially mediated the relation between group status (autistic or not) and reading comprehension. This mediation was significant for non-literal comprehension skills (i.e., those involving inference, evaluation, and mentalization) but not for literal comprehension skills (i.e., those involving simple recall and recognition of textually explicit information). These findings indicate that ToM partially explains the differences in non-literal reading comprehension between children with autism and their TD peers. Copyright © Routledge.