Museums provide direct learning experiences. In museums visitors can encounter objects and exhibits from specific times and places, related to concepts and disciplinary subjects in the arts, history, science, and social sciences. A museum is an educational fair. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government’s recent primary school General Studies curriculum guide recommends learning through museums as an informal learning pathway for all students. This project is an up-to-date exploratory study of why and how Hong Kong primary school teachers and students visit museums educationally and how they perceive those visits and the accompanying learning experiences. A survey study from a sample of five local primary schools, 90 teachers and 415 senior form students, shows that although teachers and students may not visit museums very frequently for academic purposes, they do have a strong interest and motivation to visit more often, attracted by different elements. Students’ learning and interaction with technology, adults and peers, and the museum environment during a visit, as well as the attractiveness of museum content, tend to correlate with their motivations. This has a range of implications which we discuss. This study will be useful for museum experts, educators and the wider public to map meaningful museum education journeys for students. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.

Creativity is an important 21st Century skill that enhances students’ ability to see new opportunities, confront new challenges, and adapt flexibly to the changing study, work and life situations. To nurture students with strong self-efficacy in creative thinking is as important as the contexts and strategies involved in its application. But how to develop sustainable interventions (without generating excessive workload for teachers) to promote students’ self-efficacy in creativity is a long-lasting challenge. This study presents a simple and relatively cost-effective instructional intervention, i.e., self-assessment mind maps, and examines its effect on students’ self-efficacy in creativity, self-efficacy in learning English, and academic performance in English language tests. A pretest-posttest non-equivalent design was adopted for the experimental and control groups of students in a Hong Kong primary school in 2021/22 Spring semester. The results show that students from the experimental group significantly outperformed those from the control group on self-efficacy in creativity after the intervention. However, the intervention did not improve students’ self-efficacy and test performance in English learning. The findings demonstrate the potential of self-assessment mind maps as an effective and sustainable instruction intervention to promote students’ higher-order abilities. This study sheds light on designing sustainable instructional strategies for empowerment in creativity. Copyright © 2022 Yan, Lee, Hui and Lao.

A museum is an educational fair which facilitates individuals to explore and discover through inquiry. Museums provide participants with direct learning experience with objects and exhibits that relate to concepts and disciplinary subjects in the arts, history, science, and social science of specific time and space. Learning through museums is considered as one of the informal learning ways which is very different from formal learning in schools. This study aims to investigate Hong Kong primary school teachers’ and students’ perspectives, learning experiences and motivations in museum learning and visits. A survey study is adopted to gather the views and experiences of a sample of senior primary school students and teachers, in the local primary school context, on museum learning and visits in the past three years. Learners’ actual and preferred visits to museums as well as the types of motivations involved in visiting museums in a Chinese culture and context will be explored. The ways of interactions and various types of museum learning will also be examined, and teachers’ and students’ perspectives will also be compared. This study will provide insights into the enhancement of meaningful museum education journeys for students. Copyright © 2021 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

Hong Kong is moving towards a knowledge-based economy. In order to nurture and motivate a population to continuously achieve world-class success, Hong Kong‟s education system has been reformed extensively since 1997, with a balanced focus on academic and practical learning. Generic forms of learning outcomes are critical to allow students to demonstrate high flexibility and adaptability in response to ever-changing challenges in the future. By using two well-validated instruments which measure students‟ achievement of generic learning outcomes and their engagement in schools, the cultural literacy and student engagement scales, this study aims to assess the development of generic learning outcomes of Hong Kong senior secondary school students, the extent to which students are well-equipped with the skills to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. The results of a survey study of 1,715 students inferred that their performances were not up to standard and questioned in particular the success of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) school curriculum. A regression model further suggested that these generic learning outcomes could largely be explained by how schools plan and facilitate students‟ learning inside and outside the classroom. It is argued that the primary role of NSS schools should focus to provide students with meaningful and useful learning experiences so as to achieve the curriculum goal of fostering their generic learning. This paper will contribute to the discussion of how to better support the NSS curriculum reform in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.

This study aimed to elaborate and make clear the correlations and cause-and-effect relationships among the variables: depression, suicide cognitions, positive perfectionism, and negative perfectionism. The participants comprised 412 Chinese university students at two Hong Kong universities, who completed the 18-item Suicide Cognitions Scale, the depression subscale of the 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale, and the 12-item Positive and Negative Perfectionism Scale. The results of regression analysis indicated that depression is negatively predicted by positive perfectionism and positively predicted by negative perfectionism. Positive and negative perfectionism and depression were all found to be significant predictors of suicide cognitions. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that positive perfectionism and negative perfectionism have significant effects on suicide cognitions, and that suicide cognitions significantly affect depression. Individuals who exhibit healthy perfectionism may experience positive outcomes. It is critical for educators and parents to recognize the differences between positive perfectionism and negative perfectionism. When educators and parents convey negative perfectionist ideas to children, the outcomes can be extremely harmful. Copyright by Special Education Society of Hong Kong Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Hong Kong has been implementing a policy of assessment for learning to counter-balance the strong, high-stakes, summative, and examination-oriented practices of the territory. While the purposes teachers have for various classroom assessment tasks are devoted to this learning premise, their views are bounded by the social expectations of assessment for accountability. This paper reports on a study of the types of assessment tasks used by four primary school curriculum leaders, the nature of assessment for learning in Hong Kong primary school context, and their views of how the tasks could support learning improvement in the accountability era. Results indicate that, consistent with official policy, “improvement” was the dominant reason for using the eight assessment tasks discussed in interviews. However, these tasks also met the functions of “accountability,” consistent with the dominant use of assessment in the Chinese context. It appears that assessment for learning in Hong Kong practice is still bounded by the need to demonstrating school quality through the preparation of students for examinations, which raises questions about the policy’s validity. This paper concludes with factors that hinder a formative learning practice and recommends some follow-up strategies under this improvement-accountability tension.
[Copyright © 2017 Education Research Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.]

Hong Kong has an assessment for learning policy and a cultural context that emphasizes examinations. In addition to associating student grading with improvement, important improvement-oriented conceptions have been identified among Hong Kong teachers and which were not fully instantiated in the original Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA) inventory. An expanded Chinese-TCoA inventory was administered to in Chinese in both Hong Kong and southern China. The intended 6 construct structure was not supported. Exploratory factor analysis (MLE, oblimin rotation) identified 7 factors, which were further reduced to 3 major inter-correlated constructs (i.e., improvement, accountability, and irrelevance). Improvement and accountability were strongly inter-correlated (r=.80), while improvement had a weak negative correlation with irrelevance and accountability had a weak positive correlation with irrelevance. The model had 7 factors based on 33 items and acceptable fit (χ2=3856.97, df=426; χ2/df=9.05, p<.001; CFI=.85; RMSEA=.065; SRMR=.065; gamma=.90). Two group nested invariance testing (i.e., Hong Kong vs. southern China) showed that the model was statistically equivalent, except for item residuals (k=62; χ2=4612.89, df=891; χ2/df=5.18, p=.02; CFI=.83; RMSEA=.047; SRMR=.065; gamma=.94). Differences in mean scores between the two groups showed that Hong Kong teachers agreed more with the ideas of assessments helping student learning, being accurate, and being examinations; whereas southern China teachers agreed more that assessment was irrelevant. This study contributes to our understanding of how assessment is understood by teachers working within Chinese contexts.
[Copyright © 2010 The Authors.]