Primary school pupils’ attributions of academic success are presented in this study. The sample for the study comprised 1154 Year-3 and Year-5 pupils from ten primary schools in Hong Kong. Pupils’ academic attributions were measured by a 16-item Academic Attribution Scale. Pupils indicated the extent to which they attributed their performance at examinations, tests, homework assignments, and class work to luck, ability, effort and use of strategy, on the scale. It was found that girls tended to have healthier attributions than boys did. Girls attributed significantly more to strategy use and effort than boys did. Boys attributed performance to luck significantly more than girls did. Multilevel analysis showed that there was significant school-level and class-level variance for attributional beliefs. Nevertheless, most of the higher level variances of attributional beliefs occurred at the class-level rather than at school level. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed in the article.
[Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a project for developing self-directed learning in student teachers. The study involved 20 student teachers currently enrolled at The Hong Kong Institute of Education. The study contextualized self-directed learning in the Education Projects module. Each student teacher designed and implemented a small educational research project. The Know Want Learn (KWL) method, concept map and a reflection question were used to collect data on the change in the self-directed learning capacity of student teachers. Data analysis revealed that student teachers had differential growth in selfdirected learning competence. Further, both quantitative and qualitative changes were observed in student teachers’ conceptualizations of educational research. Nevertheless, capacity remained for further improvement in their capacity for self-directed learning.
[Copyright © 2005 International Self-Directed Learning Symposium Group.]

This study aimed to identify clusters of primary students based on their mathematics achievement, and their perceived usefulness of and expectation of feedback from teachers, and second, to examine profiles of self-regulated learning of the students in these clusters. The sample consisted of 4,570 students at Primary 3 to Primary 5 in Hong Kong. Two-step cluster analysis identified three clusters of students in each year level, namely, low achievers with negative feedback attitudes, high achievers with moderately positive feedback attitudes, and moderate achievers with strong positive feedback attitudes. Further, the clusters of moderate and high achievers shared similar mathematics self-efficacy, but moderate achievers had higher achievement goals and stronger self-regulated learning practices than either high or low achievers. Further, low achievers had the lowest, and moderate achievers the highest, self-regulated learning in mathematics. These results were consistent across year levels.
[Copyright © 2014 National Academy for Educational Research.]

School teachers, in the move of educational assessment reform in Hong Kong, are currently developing their professional competence on making a good use of assessment to enhance their own teaching. Both groups of school teachers and teacher educators are concerned with the issue about how to make sense of assessment data and to transform them into feedback useful to classroom instruction. This research seeks to understand the kinds of protocols of assessment data school teachers perceived as practical information to become useful feedback to their teaching. We conducted 2 types of protocols using different analysis methods of assessment data (that is, basic item analysis and Rasch model) to represent primary and secondary students' responses to objective test items assessing the competency of reading comprehension of Chinese literatures. We presented the protocols to primary and secondary school teachers who are teaching Chinese language subject in Hong Kong. After demonstrations, we interviewed the groups to understand their perceptions on the protocols. Results shows that teachers most value assessment data which can help in identifying students' strength and weakness, assuring test item quality, stimulating reflection on their teaching practice, and turns out to become the foundation for rebuilding their classroom instruction.

One major endeavour of the educational assessment reform in Hong Kong is to translate the idea of assessment for learning into the school teacher's everyday practice. The idea,assessment for learning, emphasizes that classroom assessment should enable the teacher to give feedback about a student's learning and to obtain feedback which inform his or her own teaching. Both groups of school teachers and teacher educators are concerned with the issue about how to make sense of assessment data and to transform them into feedback useful to learning and teaching. This research seeks to understand the kinds of protocols of assessment data school teachers perceived as practical information to become useful feedback to learning and teaching. We conducted 2 types of protocols using different analysis methods of assessment data (that is, basic item analysis and Rasch model) to represent primary and secondary students' responses to objective test items assessing the competency of reading comprehension of Chinese literatures. We presented the protocols to primary and secondary school teachers who are currently teaching Chinese language subject in Hong Kong. After our demonstrations of the protocols, we interviewed the participant teachers to obtain their perceptions on each type of protocols. Results of the teachers' perceptions are discussed in this paper.

Learning is the focus of attention for any educational enterprise. Consequently, the quality of assessment of the extent to which learning has occurred is of crucial importance. Assessment plays an important role in education in Hong Kong as in other places. Nevertheless, how to design an assessment that is of high quality, or how to fully utilize the results of the assessment to understand more deeply about the ability of our students is a demanding task for most teachers. It is not uncommon for teachers to assume that those students who cannot get good assessment results are weak students or that they have learning problems. Teachers rarely question the quality of assessment items to be the source of problems. In other words, teachers seldom consider the possibilities that the items may be too difficult, or unsuitable for the students' levels. In fact, it is worth investigating both the students' and items' performances for the assessments in order to understand more about the ability of our students. Under such circumstances, Rasch Measurement Model is a tool that teachers may consider to assist them for interpreting and analyzing the alignment between student ability and assessment item difficulty. In Rasch modelling, the data are checked, using a set of procedures and criteria, for the extent to which they match with the theoretical model. In particular, the point-measure correlations, and the INFIT and OUTFIT statistics are used to assess the goodness of fit between model and data. This study aims to illustrate how teachers can make use of these statistics from Rasch modelling to support them in the implementation of learning oriented assessment. The study will be based on assessment data obtained from two classes of Primary Three Students in a local school in July 2006. In the study, we will focus on the implication of misfit persons and items by using Rasch Measurement Model so as to discuss ways for understanding our students and improving the items and setting

Hong Kong Teachers understand students' abilities and ranked students' position by the scores of quizzes, tests and examination. Setting items for assessing students is therefore one of significant tasks for Hong Kong teachers. Teachers usually set items to access their students based on what they taught in the classroom. Teachers do not usually consider whether the items are set appropriately to measure their students' abilities. On the other hand, it is important for the teachers learn the quality control of item settings. Rasch measurement is a quality control mechanism and good for diagnosis. The area of diagnosis includes item misfit between items and persons, and probability of a person's correctly answering the item against his ability. The diagnostic information obtained can be used by teachers to enhance their assessment tools such that teachers are better informed about their students' learning. Nonetheless, such diagnoses are under-utilised. The aim of this study is to illustrate how the diagnostic information can be generated from Rasch measurement using the Winsteps software, and how teachers can make use of such information to enhance assessment tools. In particular, this study focused on how to use one of the Item Characteristic Curve as a diagnostic tool in order to analyze the relationship between students' abilities and item difficulties. Based on this analysis, teachers can discern the quality of items in the assessment and hence obtain more accurate estimates of students' abilities and item difficulties. The sample for the study involved about 150 Primary Three students from a local school. Students' basic competencies in mathematics at end of Key-Stage-l were gauged in June 2006 using an assessment tool designed by the authors. Rasch measurements of the students were obtained using the Winsteps software. Item Characteristic Curves of the items were analysed to diagnose the psychometric qualities of the assessment tool. Implications for teachers in