香港自2012年推出新高中學制之後，除了考試制度的改革，非正規教育的改革亦馬不停蹄，生涯規劃教育與職業教育的變化特別明顯。自2014年開始，香港全面推行生涯規劃教育，以求改善舊有升學及就業輔導之弊，2015年則開始重塑職業教育為職業專才教育，將職業教育重新納入主要的教育政策議題之中。相對下，生命教育的發展較為停滯不前。直至2019年，香港政府委託顧問就生涯規劃教育推行成效發表研究報告，並建議將生涯規劃教育結合生命教育一同推行，推動學生的全人發展，生命教育方重新成為整個教育改革藍圖的一部份。同年，香港政府提出進一步推動價值觀教育的發展，尤其優先重視生命教育，可見生命教育與價值觀教育將成下一步非正規課程改革的重心。明顯地，生涯規劃教育、生命教育與職業教育三者的拓展似乎正在呼應《教育行動計劃2030》宣言的提倡。有鑑及此，本文將申論三者其實應該如何貫穿實踐，以切合香港實況，並以香港一項大型生涯規劃的項目為切入點作深入分析。Since the introduction of the New Academic Structure in 2012, policy reform in non-formal education was implemented along with a structural change of the public examination system. In 2014, Life Planning Education was launched to optimize the problem in the over-reliance on career counselling and guidance, while Vocational Education was officially rebranded as Vocational Professional Education and Training in 2015, and it is now regarded as one of the main agendas in the current Hong Kong education policy. In comparison, the development of Life Education has stalled for a long time until the publication of one policy consultancy research report in 2019, which recommended the possible merge of Life Education with Life Planning Education in the future implementation. In the same year, the Hong Kong government proposed the strengthening of support on Values Education in schools through prioritizing Life Education in the policy. This implies that critical role of Life and Values Education in the forthcoming non-formal curriculum reform. It is apparent that the newest development of Life Planning Education, Vocational Education and Life Education are all well-aligned with the initiative of ＂Education 2030＂ proposed by UNESCO. In light of this, this paper will examine how these three components have developed and implemented in the local Hong Kong context, with the support of an analytical case study based on a large-scale youth programme for Career and Life Planning for illustration. Copyright © 2020 台灣教育研究院社.

This Hong Kong study evaluated a strengths-based career intervention program for junior secondary school students with special educational needs. The treatment group comprised 19 boys and 13 girls with SEN from 5 schools, with an additional 28 SEN students forming the control group matched for age, gender and parents’ education level. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires covering career development self-efficacy, personal and social development, and meaning in life were administered to both groups. Several months after the intervention, participants, teachers and social workers involved were interviewed to evaluate effects of the intervention. Findings indicated significant interactions between Time 1 and Time 2, and between control vs. treatment groups in personal goal-setting, career goal-setting, and presence of meaning in life. Several themes emerged from the interviews suggesting that the intervention had positive effects on SEN students’ career, personal and social development, self-efficacy, and meaning in life. Copyright © 2022 Meaning in Life (MIL) International Conference.

Career and Life Development (CLD) (or ‘Career Development and Life Planning’) refers to a big spectrum of educational practices that aims to help young people embraces a holistic and comprehensive process to plan one’s life and actively implements the goals determined in own social context (Leung, 2005). It usually comprises of three aspects of education: (1) self-understanding, (2) knowing the dynamic world of work, and (3) nurturing reflective habits of mind about own future career pathways or personal planning. The aim of this study is to analyze school-based CLD effectiveness in Hong Kong by adopting a school improvement instrument, ‘the Hong Kong Benchmarks for Career and Life Development’ (HKBM) which is initiated by CLAP@JC, with close reference to the world-recognized framework in the United Kingdom, the Gatsby’s Benchmarks for Career Guidance (Holman, 2014; Holman & Yip, 2020). Using HKBM, whole school self-evaluation was conducted by CLD leaders in each school under support from teams of ‘critical friends’ (Swaffield & Macbeath, 2005). After examining the HKBM dataset collected from 44 secondary schools, key findings are: (a) effective CLD provision requires a visible and stable policy with strong school leaders’ backing; (b) schools are offering insufficient opportunities of career-related experiences and one-to-one personal guidance on CLD, despite the backing from government policy since 2014. There are implications to policies in terms of School-Business Partnerships, and to strategic planning and implementation of school-based CLD. Copyright © 2021 HKERA-APERA International Conference.

Despite its continuing rise, homeschooling in Hong Kong and many other Chinese cities is under-studied in academic research, underrepresented in society, invisible in public policy, and even marginalized within parent communities. Unlike many cases in Western societies, homeschooling in Hong Kong appears to be largely a ‘middle-class phenomenon’—better-off Chinese parents in Hong Kong can draw on their resources and navigate opportunities in the existing legal framework so that homeschooling is a viable option for their children’s education. Putting this phenomenon into a wider context of stratification and inequality, alternative middle-class choice and practice that ‘opt out’ of a traditional school system to homeschool their children problematizes our common sense understanding of middle-class trajectories. For instance, would these middle-class parents fear any loss of educational privilege that they would otherwise have in a traditional school system? Or, conversely, would these parents think that homeschooling is ideally suited for their children, who, in turn, may gain even more ‘home advantage’ over their schooled peers? Or would these parents pursue alternative forms of aspiration and privilege for their children? With these questions in mind, this study explores how Chinese homeschooling parents perceive and make sense of their homeschooling choice, with emphasis on the relation to social class. Data were drawn from in-depth interviews with 15 homeschooling families in Hong Kong. We will discuss the preliminary findings of this study and the theoretical implications for how Chinese homeschooling phenomenon constitutes the analytical leverage for theorizing a relatively unexplored area of middle-class reproduction processes. Copyright © 2022 British Sociological Association.

The study focused on Hong Kong mathematics teachers’ personal experiences and challenges in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. A SWOC analysis is adopted. Results showed that they tried to offer e-learning as an alternative mode of teaching to maintain the education service within the pandemic. Hong Kong teachers tended to focus on external factors rather than internal factors in the initial period of online teaching. They agreed that there was a paradigm shift in the role of teaching during the crisis. They were commonly building a sufficient level in using technology, but this was not equivalent to be competent in achieving instructional goals. Mathematics teachers’ professional knowledge is influenced by their personal online teaching experiences. Their attitudes and beliefs are crucial factors in the role and effectiveness of using online teaching. Copyright © 2021 left to authors.

Concerns of equity with respect to the community college model in East Asia persist in educational research. In this study, we described and analysed students’ “lived experience” in community colleges in Hong Kong in terms of the “warming up” or “cooling out” of their educational desire. Semistructured interviews with 14 graduates of community colleges in Hong Kong were conducted to determine how their experiences at community colleges affected their educational expectations and the extent to which community colleges help students reconsider their educational disadvantages in a competitive, meritocratic and massified higher education system. The qualitative interview data were inductively thematised into four aspects of college experience in relation to their educational expectations. The data revealed that Hong Kong’s community colleges help some students develop their capabilities and change their educational expectations through democratic admissions, liberal pedagogic environments, learner-centred formative assessment and student services for strategic university articulation. Rather than cooling-out students’ educational desire (characterised by gradual disengagement, objective denial, alternative achievement), community colleges in Hong Kong provide a second chance for failing and disadvantaged students to pursue a university education, but this warming-up function applies only to students who benefitted from the liberal mode of assessment and discovered and developed their academic capabilities in their college experience. The paper ends with a critical analysis of the problem of such warming up of educational desire and the extent to which community colleges can empower disadvantaged students for a good life. Copyright © 2022 The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc.

How can higher education institutions promote online education effectively? While education technology literature has offered various pedagogical prescriptions, inadequate attention has been paid to the individual-level factors that facilitate or prevent participant engagement, such as their e-readiness, work style, and work-life balance. Using data from a unique online survey of teachers and students in the three sites of Hong Kong, London and Singapore, this paper seeks to explore the ongoing experience of online education under the COVID-19 episode in a comprehensive manner that covers both perspectives of instructors and learners. It seeks to understand what kind of university-level support is available and how they are received by respondents, which offers timely insights as an unprecedented number of universities around the world are being pushed to embrace online education. Preliminary results suggest that while technological support is necessary, it needs to be supplemented by other policy instruments, such as flexible deadline and assessments or wellbeing and distressing advice, so as to help tackle the challenge of balancing teaching/learning with caring responsibilities while working/studying from home. Copyright © 2020 APPAM.

Objectives: Interprofessional education (IPE) harnesses the power of teams to facilitate collaborative learning across disciplines. However, prior research has not paid sufficient attention to the role of team-level factors on IPE outcomes, posing a major theoretical and methodological limitation. In response to this, using social interdependence theory (SIT), this study aimed to delineate the independent contributions of both team-level and student-level interprofessional attitudes (teamwork, roles, and responsibilities; patient-centeredness; and community-centeredness) in predicting IPE collaboration outcomes (goal achievement, team effectiveness, and team performance) employing multi-level analysis.Methods: To test whether interprofessional attitudes at the team and student levels predict IPE collaboration outcomes, conducted multilevel modeling. We used the pretest and posttest data from 323 healthcare students in Hong Kong from Chinese medicine, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work programmes enrolled in the IPE Cancer module.Results: Among the interprofessional attitudes, “teamwork, roles, and responsibilities” was found to be the best predictor of IPE outcomes, both at the student and team levels. Students who recognized the benefits of shared learning had better goal achievement and team effectiveness. Furthermore, teams that emphasized shared learning also had better overall team performance.Conclusions: Students' attitudes towards teamwork, roles, and responsibilities in interprofessional collaborative practice, both at the student and team levels, are important to attaining positive student- and team-level outcomes. The study contributes to the expansion of existing knowledge in medical education, theoretically, by adopting SIT as a lens through which collaborative learning in healthcare teams can be understood, and methodologically, by applying multi-level approaches and delineating important student- and team-level predictors of IPE outcomes. Copyright