In many societies, policy-makers have formulated different policies to strengthen moral development, character attributes and/or citizenship for young people. In this review, we examined the related education policies in the Asian (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) and Western (the United Kingdom and the United States) contexts and compared them in terms of their aims, core values, strategy, lesson time, evaluation, curriculum materials, and teacher training. With particular reference to Hong Kong, the review shows that there are many challenges for the "moral and citizenship" education. These include a lack of theory and research based policy development, stagnant progress in the past two decades, blurred concepts in the related policies, weak emphasis on related education in schools, problems of the "penetrative" approach, lack of validated and standard curriculum materials, problems in implementation strategies and tactics, and unsystematic evaluation. Copyright © 2021 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

At present, there is a growing concern about cultivating virtue among youngsters in Hong Kong. Although moral and character education have been put on the education agenda, it is important to ensure that teachers have sufficient efficacy in moral and character education. Unfortunately, limited empirical evidence for this has been found within the Hong Kong context. Using a sample of 647 moral and character education teachers from 21 secondary schools in Hong Kong, this study examined teacher self-efficacy and its relations with teacher engagement and teacher emotional labour. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the construct validity of each scale. Structural equation modelling was used to test the theoretical model, indicating a good model fit. The strongest predictor of teacher efficacy for moral education was teachers’ personal teaching efficacy. The findings are discussed with implications for future practice and research. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Adolescent problems in Hong Kong have brought questions about their moral development and mental health to light. Moral education for preschool children will be strategically important to address these issues because applying early educational interventions to preschool children will effectively enhance their personal development. This article highlights the inadequacy of the Hong Kong preschool curriculum guides in the promotion of moral development in children. The lack of a consensus about the values and character that preschool children should develop is a fundamental problem of implementing preschool moral education in Hong Kong. If moral education is regarded as a school curriculum, either formal or informal, the objectives, content and assessment should be closely adhered to one another. In addition, the learning and teaching activities should also be in line with student's developmental characteristics and experiences. The O-C-A model is then proposed for moral education in the preschool settings of Hong Kong. Advice has also been made for the promotion of moral education in Hong Kong's early childhood settings.
[Copyright of Global Studies of Childhood is the property of SAGE Publications.]

Because of the changing needs of society, brought about in part by workplace, family and social structures and partly by the decline of moral and ethical values, it is becoming increasingly urgent to address issues of values education at all levels of schooling. Recently there has been an increasing body of literature challenging those who teach adults at universities or other higher education institutions to incorporate values education, either directly or indirectly into the learning environments they create. This challenge extends to distance higher education, although there are many questions about how this can be done in an environment that is typically intended for independent learning with a focus on cognitive development. This paper reports the outcomes of interviews with three small groups of distance educator stakeholders at the Open University of Hong Kong, namely course co-ordinators, tutors and students, to explore their feelings and beliefs about values education being a component of their programmes. The interviews sought opinions about three broad questions: Should we take responsibility for values education in our distance education programmes? Can we take responsibility for values education in our distance education programmes? Do we take responsibility for values education in our distance education programmes? Responses suggested that, in the context of this study, we should and that it is possible to do so, particularly directly through the use of counselling and support services and indirectly through incorporating appropriate examples into course materials, but that currently not very much is being done. While the course co-ordinators and tutors were concerned that students might resent the inclusion of values education in their courses, the students themselves appeared to be more open to the suggestion.
[Copyright of International Journal of Lifelong Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's