Learning strategies and affective factors could have a profound impact on student standardized mathematics performance. This study investigated gender differences in affective factors, learning strategies, and preferred learning situations, and how these variables affect math achievement of 15 year olds in the United States and Hong Kong on the PISA 2003 assessment. Math self-efficacy was found to be the best predictor of math performance in both countries. A striking mismatch was identified between Hong Kong students' superior math performance and extremely low math self-concept and between U.S. students' high confidence and weak performance. In addition, U.S. students' interest in math was significantly negatively related to their math performance. Contrary to a widely reported finding that East Asian students emphasize memorization, U.S. students were found to heavily rely on memorization strategies, which was also a negative predictor of math achievement.
[Copyright of International Journal of Testing is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15305050903106875]

Gender differences in creativity scores of the Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests were found for a sample of 2476 4th- to 9th-graders from 8 primary schools and 4 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Specifically, girls in the junior high grades excelled boys in verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness. These findings contrasted with previous findings of no gender differences in a norming study of the same instrument carried out eight years before this study. The gender differences were explained in terms of environmental effect and cultural effect.
[Copyright of Creativity Research Journal is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2010.481522]

Vygotsky speculated that parents play an important role in the intellectual development of their children, and that this role includes the transfer of expectations related to their children's academic achievement. Consequently, different parents can produce different contexts of academic achievement for their children. The participants were 215 Primary 5 and 6 students from four primary schools in Hong Kong, and their parents. Students were administered a test of working memory and their academic achievement was indicated by their schoolassessed mathematics and language achievement scores. Parents reported their expectations of their children's academic achievement, the extent of their home and school involvement, and their educational and income levels. Correlational and sequential regression analyses showed that different schools yielded different contexts of academic achievement. The results support the hypothesis that parents, and especially parental expectations, play an important role in children's academic achievement, and that within Hong Kong different schools can be characterised by different contexts of achievement.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410903059024]

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among parental goals, parental beliefs and parenting styles. Questionnaires were completed during interviews with 189 Hong Kong-Chinese mothers of children aged six to eight years. Results indicated that these mothers embraced Chinese parental beliefs (guan) and Chinese parental goals of filial piety and harmonious social relationships. In contrast to other studies on Chinese parenting, this study examined Chinese mothers' adoption of psychological control in addition to authoritarian and authoritative parenting. Participants' main styles were found to be authoritative and psychologically controlling rather than authoritarian as reported in previous research. Parental goals were found to mediate the effect of parental beliefs on adoption of parenting styles. Mothers who embraced guan and filial piety reported either an authoritarian or a psychologically controlling parenting style, while those who embraced guan and harmonious social relationships adopted an authoritative parenting style.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430701536525]

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.
[Copyright of International Journal of Multilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/ijm068.0]