Sending children to school is a big issue to thousands of parents. In order to enroll a ‘desirable’ primary school, parents spend plenty of time in getting an application form and to prepare their children to take the grade one admission test. It seems that going to school is very significant in the eye of the parents; however, what is school really meant to children? This study which aims at describing the feelings and thoughts of children about school, interviewed with 54 students in three primary schools. Results show that most children like going to school due to the variety of school lives like meting friends during recesses. Lessons like physical education, arts and craft were very attractive. They also felt that going to school is necessary. Some children believed that the aim of study and the main role of being students was to achieve good results. As educators, we need to listen to children’s voices and examine their perspectives and opinions carefully because they would provide us with a remarkable reflection of how to run an ideal school.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

The purpose of this study was to compare attitudes of final year students in teacher preparation programs in Hong Kong and Taiwan toward including students with disabilities into regular settings, and to further examine the influences of attitudes on the development of adapted physical education programs. A 15-item questionnaire was used to investigate students' attitudes and concerns toward inclusion. Seventy-seven students from Hong Kong and Taiwan participated in this study. The results of the survey indicated that students in Hong Kong and Taiwan philosophically support inclusion, although there were many concerns and different opinions regarding inclusion. The survey indicated that students from both locations thought special schools and teachers with special training will provide better education for students with disabilities than general teachers, and indicated the needs for more academic preparation for inclusion. The findings also suggest that without well prepared support services and other accommodations, students with disabilities will not benefit from these educational environments.
[Copyright © 2005 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

The concern to develop rigorous techniques of assessment for sandwich placement performance seems to be motivated by a number of considerations. Assessment, as is often argued, helps to give the placement, and the experiential learning, which occurs, in the placement, due academic weight, and hence the integration of theory and practice would be given a higher priority. Furthermore, assessment of placement performance is occasionally implicitly used as a proxy for the evaluation of the idea of sandwich placements per se. it is argued here that none of these motives for assessment is strong enough to justify the disruption to placements that an undue emphasis on assessment may produce, and that the final reason, i.e. that assessment stands proxy for evaluation, is just plain illogical. It can be argued therefore, that the use of assessment is to facilitate genuine, meaningful experiential learning; part of a ‘conversation’ between students and teachers (whether placement tutor or on-placement supervisor), which is aimed at an ongoing negotiation of significant personal objectives and an appraisal of the students’ success in fulfilling them. In addition, that the summative assessment processes, as a human and social enterprise, involves three phases: 1. the perception of relevant students’ behaviour; 2. the judgement as to its quality as placement performance, and 3. the communication of this assessment to an audience. When analyzing these processes in detail, it can be deducted that they are fraught eith difficulty, and that they certainly ought not to be used to provide the basis for quantitative measure. In addition, these problems are not amenable to technical solution, that is, there is no possible measuring technique, which could magically render the human process of erecting a scale of measurement of performance. Yet it is justifiable to require an overall report of placement performance. Hence, it is suggested that a qualitative account includes a transcript of

School-based Assessment (SBA) in English Language is a new core component recently included in the Hong Kong university entrance public examination. It goes together with the promotion of an assessment for learning culture, in which enhancing students' learning is the major concern. This initiative marks an important and ambitious change in examination policy and school practice. Besides its assessment function, feedback forms a prominent tool in facilitating student progress in learning. It is important to understand students' perspectives towards feedback as students' ability to learn from feedback relates to their capacity to make sense of and apply feedback to further their learning. This study looks at students' perceptions of feedback in SBA and whether students react to feedback as a means to 'feed-forward'. The data were gathered from forty-five Form 5 (Grade 11) students in 3 schools through student focus groups and semi-structured interview with teachers. Findings suggest that students did not react in the same way to assessment feedback. Not all students had the strategies to effectively collect, organize and use feedback. The findings suggest that it is through mutual construction of achievement and improvement that students can become active participants in the process of classroom assessment and feedback.
[Copyright © Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA)].

Empirical Research Background: Recent waves of Fullbright and other charity foundations‘ sponsored American English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) integration into tertiary module teaching and learning in Asian countries, has raised concerns whether the ETAs are welcomed by students. Empirical Research Aims: The present study discusses the development and piloting of an instrument to evaluate students‘ perspectives of ETAs‘ role in module teaching and learning in a tertiary context in Hong Kong. Empirical Research Sample: Participants were 153 students from modules that involved ETAs, ranging from first to third year students of four year undergraduate programmes. Empirical Research Method: Students were asked to rate their agreement to 20 statements related to ETAs‘ role in and out of classroom situations on a 4-point category. Empirical Research RASCH: Rasch analysis was used to determine the fit and reliability of the items and the performance of the category structures. Empirical Research Results: Adequate item and person separations were found for all items except for two. Repeated analysis without these items showed improvements in item and person fit and separations. Individual item category structures were generally found to fulfill Linacre‘s (2004) eight guidelines for well performing categories. Empirical Research Conclusions: The resulting 18-item tool is suitable for future evaluations of ETA‘s role in module teaching and learning in tertiary context.

In the era of colonial rule, citizenship education was characterized by depoliticization in which the British government did not allow teachers to do any form of political teaching in schools before the 1990s and there was a lack of any democratic values and critical thinking skills in the content of civic education or social studies curriculum. After the sovereignty was returned to China in 1997, Civic Education in Hong Kong has still been criticized as being apolitical in nature. The intention of developing students with the ideology of participatory democracy and active citizens has been minimised while patriotic and national education has been put in top priority in the curriculum reform since 2001. Interestingly, a few secondary students took initiatives to participate in the mass demonstrations on 1st July and in the candle nights of memorizing the victims in the Tiananmen Square Incident on 4th June every year. The aim of this article is to report a study of how some young people have become active and participatory citizens in an apolitical educational context of Hong Kong. The interpretive methodological approach for collecting and analyzing data was employed in this qualitative study. Based on data collected from focus group and individual interviews with secondary school students and civic education teachers respectively, this article explores how students are socialized to be active and participatory citizens. The results show that students experience primary socialization in schools where civic education teachers having critical mindsets and deep beliefs in pursuing social justice will help catalyze their political socialization process during which the students gradually develop within themselves the passion of civic consciousness and the competence of civic courage. These are the necessary qualities that help facilitate youngsters to participate in social services, social and political gatherings and demonstrations. It is also found that other secondary

Modern classroom learning models have delineated that student characteristics factors, the teaching context and the learning process all have important influence on learning outcomes. Biggs' 3P model of classroom learning has provided a comprehensive conception of the interrelationships of the various components involved. It has also provided a conceptual framework for many studies in student learning in recent years. Following Biggs' conceptual model, this study investigates students' personality characteristics, the learning context as perceived by learners, the way they go about studying and the influence they cast on achievement outcomes. Previous studies have shown that motivational orientations, self-esteem, and the way students approach their learning have effects on their academic achievement. Contextual factors such as course demand, workload pressure or method of assessment also contribute to the final learning outcomes. A number of studies have investigated the nature and the interrelationships of these variables following the quantitative paradigm. While the quantitative approach provides objective, scientific evidence, the opportunity for probing deeper into the phenomenological experiences of the learners is limited. It was believed that an investigation using a qualitative method would bring more light to the subject under study. This study adopts a qualitative approach making use of interview analysis to tap deeper into the causal attributions, self-concept, perceived environment and learning approaches of Hong Kong university students. The objective was to examine the complexities of these characteristics and their impact on academic achievement. The interview sample consisted of 36 students drawn from the construction and engineering discipline in one of the universities in Hong Kong. Of the 36 students, half were high achievers and half low achievers who represented the top 10% and the bottom 10% range of academic results respectively. The author carried

This study reconceptualizes and operationalizes peer status in elementary school classrooms by considering both teachers’ and peers’ preferences. Within this framework, a sample of 1411 students (Grades 1-6) in Hong Kong were classified into four types based on combinations of their peers’ and teachers’ preference scores: (1) popular stars—those liked by both peers and teachers; (2) teachers’ pets—those liked by teachers but not by peers; (3) students’ heroes—those liked by peers but not by teachers; and (4) rejected—those disliked by both peers and teachers. Results of MANOVA tests revealed significant differences among the four status groups in their leadership, aggression, social withdrawal, and academic performance. Path analyses showed both similarities and differences among the four status groups in terms of students’ attributes and how they predicted teachers’ and peers’ preferences.
[Copyright © 2015 Canadian Center of Science and Education.]

From 2009 to 2011, the authors launched the Basic Law Education Project: Education for Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Hong Kong. This article focuses on a subset of the overarching data-set and discusses the findings that resulted from a comparative analysis of two participating schools. A survey was deployed to assess the extent to which a human rights friendly ethos existed in several institutions. Randomly selected students and all teachers from both schools were invited to participate. The collected data revealed noteworthy trends in mean scores between teachers and students in areas such as equal and fair treatment; protection of and appeal for rights; and feelings of being loved, respected, and blessed. School mission and leadership style appeared to account for significant differences. Additionally, we offer recommendations for practices that may improve human rights ethos in schools.
[Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis.]