Teacher attitudes and practices have been considered as essential in bringing about parent involvement in school education. In Hong Kong, among various home-school links, teacher-parent communication about children's learning has been agreed as the primary concern of both schools and parents. This study looks at the intentions and practices of the communication of primary school teachers with parents. It attempts to identify variables which can predict the effectiveness of such communication. A model which has taken into account the theory of planned behaviour, self-efficacy theory, expectancy theory and role theory has been proposed. Scales for measuring the variables and constructs involved have been developed. Path analyses linking the variables in a conceptual model have been conducted. Results show that a number of variables, such as "the teacher's commitment towards teaching", "personal teaching efficacy", "teacher efficacy in working parents" and "teacher's sense of shared responsibility with parents" have predictive power for teacher's intention and practices. The significance of these findings for enhancing teacher-parent communication is discussed.

Previous studies conducted in university and high school students confirmed that physical self-perceptions were hierarchically organized in 3 tiers, with global self-esteem at the apex, physical self-worth in the middle, and four physical self-perception sub-domains (sport competence, condition, body attractiveness, and strength) at the bottom. However, it is not clear whether children age 10 or under also exhibit similar pattern. In this study the 3-tier model was tested in 800 Hong Kong Chinese primary 4 and 5 pupils using structural equation modeling. Further more, how perceived importance and goal orientations affect physical self-perceptions at different level of generalities was considered.

Objective The aims of this study are to explore the interplay between parental feeding style, child eating behavior, parenting stress, and young children's weight outcomes in preschool settings in relation to the intervention and prevention of childhood obesity. Design, Setting and Participants Quantitative and qualitative methods were used. A survey of 336 Chinese parents and primary caregivers of preschool children aged 2 to 6 years was nested in 3 detailed case studies in 2011. Outcome Measures and Analysis The Parental Feeding Behavior Questionnaire and Child Eating Behavior Questionnaires, Parenting Stress Index, and BMI of young children were measured. Quantitative data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. Analysis of variance, χ2 test, and Fisher exact test were used to compare and investigate associations between variables. Qualitative data were analyzed by a multilevel framework and incorporated data from the quantitative study into an overall model. Results Significant differences were found in food responsiveness (F3,332 = 4.25, P < .01), enjoyment of food (F3,332 = 6.00, P < .01), desire to drink (F3,332 = 4.36, P < .01) with obese children; satiety responsiveness (F3,332 = 9.84, P < .01), slowness in eating (F3,332 = 24.19, P < .01), and emotional undereating (F3,332 = 4.71, P < .01) with underweight children; and parents' encouragement to eat (F3,332 = 4.10, P < .01) with underweight children. Parent-child dysfunctional interaction positively correlated with instrumental feeding (radj = 0.37) and emotional feeding (radj = 0.29). Child age, schooling, and housing were associated with child BMI (P < .01). Conclusions and Implications These findings confirmed that children's eating and feeding relates to abnormal weight, which also links to parenting stress, family socioeconomic status, and childcare practices. Funding S.A.S. Dragon Holdings Ltd. R2090.
[Copyright © 2012 Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior]

The study of linguistic sexism started in Western societies in the 1970s with the women's movement, which challenged patriarchal dominance in all facets of life. One of the main concerns of early language and gender research was to expose the distorted representation of the sexes in language use and in language systems. Linguistic sexism, by definition, refers to the use of language expressions in such a way that it constitutes an unbalanced portrayal of the sexes. Traditionally, masculine 'generics' such as he and the morpheme man are used to represent both sexes when the sex is unknown or unspecified, or when the sexes of the referents are mixed. Given that students are frequently required to assimilate the materials of their textbooks in detail, they have the potential to influence the development of students' gender-based attitudes at an impressionable age. The present study examines the problem of sexism in ESL materials used in Hong Kong secondary schools in terms of both gender roles and linguistic sexism. In view of the heightened awareness of the importance of gender equity in Hong Kong in recent years, we examine linguistic sexism from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. We investigate whether there has been any change in gender representation in recent textbooks and those used in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we investigate whether there is any tendency to omit females in verbal and pictorial texts. Other areas such as the order of appearance of males and females, depiction of the domestic, occupational and social roles of the two sexes, use of masculine generic constructions and naming conventions are also examined.

In Hong Kong, gender studies are a keenly researched area in the higher education sector. It is also our observation that many academics and teaching professionals have shown interest and growing concerns in gender issues. The anomaly is that while gender is palpably felt in classroom routines, why and how it matters rarely features in educational discourses at school level. We believe a comprehensive review of the existing literature in gender and education is needed for understanding the current phenomenon and identifying future research directions. In addition, such an exercise will also inform techniques and strategies in incorporating gender into teaching practice, the experimentation of which can be developed into gender-sensitive pedagogies. This can be considered as a form of action research that addresses the kind of gender issues that confront teaching professionals and advises how gender can be approached in subject-based teaching and learning and also professional training. Taken together, we intend to report the initial findings from a comprehensive and critical review of the current literature on gender education, and exemplars of conducting and promoting gender education identified in some specific areas; and recommend directions and ideas for research on conducting and promoting gender education at the school level.

The present study investigated the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and word reading in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with children's cognitive/linguistic skills considered as mediators and/or moderators. One hundred ninety-nine Chinese kindergarteners in Hong Kong with diverse SES backgrounds participated in this study. SES explained unique variance in English word reading even after age, phonological processing, vocabulary and working memory were controlled. However, the effect of SES on Chinese word reading became nonsignificant when these control variables were included. Moreover, phonological awareness showed a full mediating effect on the relationship between SES and Chinese word reading. Both phonological awareness and vocabulary were found to partially mediate the association between SES and English word reading. These findings complement our understanding of the relation between SES and reading development in Chinese societies and may have policy or intervention development implications.
[Copyright © 2015 UKLA.]

THE TRANSITION FROM HOME to early childhood education can be stressful for both children and parents. How parents cope with this potentially stressful event affects both the children's adaptation and the parents' lives during the preschooler stage of the family lifecycle. This paper examines how parents respond to their children's adjustment difficulties, particularly a reluctance to attend school, by examining the coping strategies of 29 Hong Kong parents. The parents expressed different kinds of negative emotions regarding their children's reluctance to go to school due to various adjustment difficulties. Parents' coping strategies can be classified as planful coping, seeking social support, accepting responsibilities, distancing, self-controlling and positive reappraisal according to Folkman and Lazarus's Ways of Coping (WOC) framework. The implications of these strategies for how early childhood professionals can support parents are discussed.
[Copyright © 2014 Early Childhood Australia Inc.]