This article reports the development of a teacher self-efficacy scale that aims to accommodate the complexity of teacher functioning in secondary schools in times of education reforms in Hong Kong. The scale was designed to assess six domains of teacher self-efficacy: teaching highly able learners, classroom management, guidance and counselling, student engagement, teaching to accommodate diversity, and teaching for enriched learning. The total scale and the six subscales were evaluated based on the responses of 159 Hong Kong Chinese prospective and in-service teachers for internal consistency and construct validity, and for convergent and discriminant validation with external measures.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410701491833]

There are a number of theoretical perspectives established for studying adult participation in education, but they are seldom examined together in single studies; neither are participants and non-participants examined simultaneously. This study examines the relative power of the major perspectives in distinguishing between and predicting participants and non-participants. Secondary school teachers who were participating or not participating in continuing professional education programmes were taken as target respondents. Results show that the theoretical perspectives of situations, dispositions, attitudes and beliefs in continuing professional education, and social norms and pressure, do not discriminate teacher participants and non-participants and are therefore not good predictors of the participation status of teachers. Only a few factors in the perspectives of motivations and socio-economic background are significant and meaningful in distinguishing the two teacher groups and in predicting participation status.
[Copyright of International Journal of Lifelong Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026013799293559]

As part of the module "Further Studies in Kindergarten Curriculum" in the Certificate in Kindergarten Teacher Education Course conducted by the Hong Kong Institute of Education, teacher-educators made use of semantic webbing to help kindergarten teachers/principals develop reflective and thinking skills regarding subject matter content and teaching curriculum. Semantic webbing/mapping or semantic networking or plot maps may be defined as a strategy in which information is categorically structured in graphic/visual form. However, its use in teacher education is more recent. Kindergarten teachers/principals were interviewed to discern how they developed critical thinking and evaluative skills concerning subject matter content and teaching curriculum through the use of semantic webbing. Interviews of a random sample of participants and analysis of their mind-maps revealed a change in perspectives and attitudes towards subject matter content and teaching curriculum. The present paper examines some of the affective outcomes for both teacher educators and student-teachers resulting from the use of semantic webbing/mapping as a strategy for facilitating reflective and critical thinking skills in four components of the module "Further Studies in Kindergarten Curriculum"; namely, Art, Language, Mathematics/Science, as well as Social Studies. Implications for teacher education are drawn from the findings.
[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/10.1080/0300443022000022422 ]

An urgent need for a relatively large number of qualified Putonghua language teachers in Hong Kong has led the Open University of Hong Kong to establish a distance education programme for in-service language teachers, most of whom are non-native speakers. The programme designed by the university involves distance study coupled with regular face-to-face tutorials, and is designed to enable the in-service teachers to apply their learned knowledge directly in their daily teaching. The article explains how evaluation of the first presentation of the course in 1996 showed that the course alone could not fully address the actual deficiencies in the teachers' Putonghua listening and speaking skills while, additionally, there was also a need to restructure the teaching methodology component of the course. The basis upon which these judgements were made is explained, and the steps taken to strengthen the course to meet these perceived deficiencies, while not adding to the students' workload, are outlined.
[Copyright of Open Learning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026805100115434]