Individuals with higher financial capability not only have more savings, fewer debts and better lives after retirement but also exhibit higher life satisfaction, fewer depressive symptoms and more prosocial behaviours towards others. Unsurprisingly, financial capability has been regarded as one of the most important ‘life skills’ by parents, educators, spouses, employers and the community. Therefore, integrating financial capability into formal school curricula and students’ learning journeys is important. Existing practices have emphasised the relevance of saving and spending to financial education but distinguishing between investment and speculation and sharing and donating has been gaining attention from educators. Most existing programmes, international or local, have been limited because they have focused relatively less on (a) the behavioural aspect of financial capability (e.g., how to save and how to control impulse buying), (b) the pedagogical approach to engage younger children and support their learning and (c) whether they were able to improve the financial knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and self-control and gratitude of the recipients. To date, no financial education programmes have been designed for and evaluated with primary school students in Asia, much less Hong Kong. The goal of this dissertation was to develop a programme that was comprehensive in content, suitable for younger children and effective in improving children’s financial capability in terms of their knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviours. The programme was called ‘The 4S Programme’ because it targeted effective saving, wise spending, distinguishing between speculation and investment and sharing. The programme consisted of 10 sessions of 60 minutes, equipped with a wide range of interactive pedagogical activities, including discussion, games, role-play, case studies and experiential learning activities. The programme was also equipped with simple, take-home worksheets that involved

Background: Little is known about the progression of obesity from childhood to adolescence. This study aimed to longitudinally examine the obesity status in a cohort of children across their childhood and adolescence, and to identify the factors associated with persistent obesity. Methods: The study used data from School Physical Fitness Award Scheme (SPFAS), a population-based programme in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools. Students were included if they participated in the SPFAS in both 2014 (Primary 1 and 2) and 2018 (Primary 5 and 6). Their anthropometric and physical fitness parameters were analyzed. Results: A total of 18,863 students were included. The baseline prevalence of obesity was 5.7 %. After 4 years, the prevalence increased to 6.7 %. Among those with obesity at baseline, 35.3 % remained obese after 4 years. The addition of baseline physical fitness level did not improve the prediction for persistent obesity. Conclusions: One-third of obese students in junior primary school remained to be obese into adolescence. Their baseline physical fitness level did not improve the predictive value for future obesity. Further studies should investigate the prognostic factors that may influence the natural course of childhood obesity.

Empirical studies on university choice and access among under-represented racial/ethnic minorities have utilised the concept of school-based social capital (SBSC)–defined by Stanton-Salazar as key resources and support provided by institutional agents (i.e. teachers, counsellors and other staff). They primarily relied upon minority students’ perceptions. Few of them canvassed both staff and student understandings and experiences of SBSC and thus have not yet captured the nature of SBSC and its influence from both the supply and demand sides. This study interviewed 18 secondary school teachers and nine minority students of South/Southeast Asian ethnicity enrolled in a publicly-funded school of Hong Kong. Its findings shed light on the highly-valued school-based support and resources staff and students viewed as helpful in the university choice process. The findings also disclosed the challenges minority students expressed about being exposed to SBSC while living in the school community, characterised by an ethos of “treating everybody the same”. This in turn rationalised staff understanding of diversity and equity-based support as a transitional approach to mainstreaming/assimilating minority students. As a result, some staff members either withheld critical information on university admission requirements or were less responsive towards the needs of the most disadvantaged minority students, despite a presumable promise to envision university for all. This study calls for structural and institutional transformation so that both individual and collective efforts can empower the least advantaged and promote their university choice and access. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

This paper aims to evaluate the fieldwork placement of a higher diploma programme in early childhood education at the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE). In response to both academic and statutory requirements associated with education ordinances, students must take sufficient supervised fieldwork placement hours throughout the programme to learn to be a Qualified Kindergarten Teacher (QKT). In current institutional evaluative practices, the corresponding department evaluates fieldwork placement quality based on concerns about student and supervisor performance using questionnaires at the end of the semester. However, the evaluation might lose sight of unanticipated outcomes and its intrinsic value when it is too focused on the predetermined evaluation’s objectives. Guided by a responsive evaluation approach, this paper suggests a new form of evaluation concerning stakeholder perspectives on intrinsic value in the programme. Accordingly, it uses the practical tool RUFDATA to frame the evaluation practices under its key categories, namely, reason, use, focus, data, audience, timing and agency. By drawing empirical data from students who have just completed the programs’ fieldwork placement in spring 2017, this qualitative evaluation investigates how fieldwork supervision develops students’ professional identity to prepare them for entry into the childcare workforce in the last fieldwork placement in the programme. Copyright © 2018 Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice.

School counselling is a well-established means of supporting the mental health of children. Counsellors are most effective when they collaborate with parents, so it is important that parents have a good understanding of and access to school counselling services. Despite this, little is known about parents’ perceptions of counselling in Hong Kong schools. We interviewed 27 parents in Hong Kong to investigate how they perceived the counselling services provided by their children’s local and international schools, and analysed the data thematically. International school parents recognised the potential of school counselling as a means of support for their children and wanted to work more closely with counsellors to a greater extent than local school parents. Parents were confused about the roles of counsellors and experienced stigma and concerns about confidentiality which inhibited them from engaging with counselling services. Our findings suggest that school principals should work with counsellors to establish and communicate roles more clearly. Greater recognition of counsellors’ professionalism, and clearer role differentiation between counsellors and other mental health and educational professionals may improve parental engagement with and support for school counselling. Copyright © 2023 NAPCE.

Previous studies on English private tutoring (EPT) have mainly focused on students and tutors who directly engaged in it. However, as EPT is a paid service and it is usually provided outside of school, parents are also important stakeholders of EPT, but EPT research has so far focused less on them. This chapter examines Chinese parents’ agency in their children’s English learning in EPT. Fourteen parents from Hong Kong and 11 from Nanchang participated in two studies respectively. These two studies adopted similar research methods by collecting data through semi-structured interviews which, from an ecological perspective, provide further evidence of the complex nature of parents’ agency in their children’s learning. Although all the parents in the two studies supported their children to attend EPT programmes, they enacted their agency differently, depending on the affordances and constraints they perceived in the situated contexts. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

An exploration of children’s lifeworlds must necessarily go beyond school, to consider children’s everyday out-of-school lives. In this chapter, we focus on the out-of-school activities of Year 4 (9- and 10-year-old) children in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We draw on survey responses from 627 children to consider their activities on weekdays after school and weekends, as well as their enjoyment of these activities. Leisure activities were most common across the cities, which are likely to be easily accessible to children, along with the academic activity of homework. To provide a closer reflection on children’s lifeworlds, we also explore the out-of-school activities of one child in each city, drawing on data (re)produced as a re-enactment of their Thursday afternoons, and a discussion of their regular activities across a week. We suggest similarities amongst the children’s activities may be partly attributed to shared features of their lives, such as their age and positioning as children, temporality, school attendance, and location in a global city, rather than constituting a universal global childhood. We also reflect on the need to consider diversity amongst children within cities to provide a more complex picture of children’s everyday out-of-school lifeworlds. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

With an increasing number of students of ethnic minority in the Education University of Hong Kong, a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for learning spoken Cantonese was designed in 2020 and was completed in 2022. The platform aimed at providing additional support to Non-Chinese Speaking (NCS) students. The researchers were the principal project leaders. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the challenges encountered and the solutions implemented. It was comprised of three parts: a self-reflective study, a questionnaire survey and an in-depth individual interview. It was found that there were five main challenges: learners’ difficulty in learning Cantonese as a tonal language (Chan & Li, 2000), a diversity of their ethnicities, a wide gap of learning differences, a low level of motivation, and finally a limited budget and labour for the creation of the MOOC (Barak et al., 2016). To address those issues, a bundle of solutions was implemented. Topics and learning objects were plotted on a scale of difficulty. After students had practiced pronunciation of items ranging from mono-syllabic words to poly-syllabic words or phrases, they had to practise multi-levelled tasks in different real-life situational contexts. Motivation was enhanced by the use of visuals, audios, learning videos and a scoring mechanism incorporated in the platform. During the production of the learning videos, students also played the roles of characters and hence provided them with more guided and authentic learning experiences. It was concluded that those methods were mostly effective in addressing the challenges. Copyright © 2023 ACCS.