Outcome-based education is a pedagogical process which focuses on the achievement of certain specified results. Outcome-based teaching and learning (OBTL), therefore, is concerned with curriculum design and ensuring that the contents, delivery, activities, and assessments are all aligned to help facilitate students to attain specific intended learning outcomes. This study explores whether and how outcome-based teaching impacts on the learning approaches of one cohort of undergraduate business students at a university in Hong Kong, China to undergo outcome-based teaching, newly introduced as part of a university-wide policy to adopt OBTL. The learning approaches of these business students were measured using John Biggs's (1987) Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) to determine whether these students tended to favor surface learning approaches, deep learning approaches, or achieving learning approaches upon initial entry into the university. Changes in learning approaches were tracked, after a semester's exposure to OBTL, through survey and focus group interview methods. Findings indicated a significant amount of transference between learning approaches deployed by these students, demonstrating a high level of adaptability.
[Copyright of Journal of Teaching in International Business is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08975930902827825]

This study examined relationships between the economic, human, social, and cultural capital of families and adolescents' academic achievement. Data were collected from 387 14-yr.-old Hong Kong students (187 girls, 200 boys), who completed questionnaires to assess their perceptions of the various dimensions of family capital. Academic achievement was measured by performance in Chinese language, English language, and mathematics. The findings indicated that different combinations of the dimensions of family capital combined to contribute to moderate amounts of variance in adolescent girls' academic performance, whereas social capital was the only family measure to have a meaningful and significant modest association with adolescent boys' academic achievement.
[Reproduced with permission of author(s) and publisher from: Majoribanks, Kevin, & Kwok, Yanny. Family capital and Hong Kong adolescents' academic achievement. Psychological Reports, 1998, 83, 99-105. © Psychological Reports 1998 Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://ammonsscientific.com/link.php?N=10332]

Transition from home to kindergarten is the first and major ecological transition in children's educational lives in Hong Kong. In this transition, children cross a cultural boundary from home to kindergarten and start to learn about 'school' as a place to learn and about themselves as 'pupils' in kindergarten. The conceptual framework of this paper is developed from sociocultural theory and select literature on rites of passage and pupil career. Descriptive data were mainly collected from participant observations, semi-structured interviews, photovoice and review of documents. Utilising the conceptual framework, this paper describes and analyses the story of a three-year-old girl's playing and learning experiences, strategic actions and adaptation outcomes during the transition from home to kindergarten in Hong Kong. Her pattern of strategic actions fell into the dimensions of non-conformity, redefinition and adaptation, but most often fell into the dimension of non-conformity, that is, being independent with respect to formal school expectations. Her preferred strategic actions included watching, being slow to respond, ignoring, withdrawal, gentle refusal, operating in alternative ways, negotiating and following the practice and expectation of the class.
[Copyright of European Early Childhood Education Research Journal is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13502930802689095]

In most EFL settings, reading is seen as related to language subjects only. Students rarely read for pleasure; they think that reading is part of the textbook-related activity. With the implementation of an extensive reading scheme and school-based assessment, students in Hong Kong begin to see reading a little differently. This paper investigates the effectiveness of a new whole-school approach reading scheme in a Chinese school in Hong Kong. Students read at least 15 minutes every school day in either Chinese or English. Results of the questionnaires and the interviews, conducted for teachers and students, indicate that teachers and students see the role of reading differently. It concludes that junior level students who have less public examination pressure enjoy reading better than the senior students. The paper informs educators in non-Asian countries as well; they will know why students from Asia are reluctant to read. The implication is that when reading has not been formed as a habit, holding up a book will be considered just part of school work.
[Copyright of Asian EFL Journal is the property of Nanzan University.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/]

In student-evaluation research, there has been considerable debate on the number of higher order factors in student ratings of university teaching. Using a distance learning program as the context for research, the study described in this article applied structural equation modeling to investigate the 2nd-order factor structure in student ratings of teaching effectiveness. An a priori model was hypothesized, which consisted of four 1st-order factors and one 2nd-order factor. Data were collected from 2,021 distance students using a multifactor questionnaire. In contrast to all past studies, the presence of a single 2nd-order factor in student ratings was empirically demonstrated through hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis. Implications for future research on the higher order factor structure in student ratings of conventional on-campus courses are also discussed.
[Copyright of Structural Equation Modeling is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15328007SEM0703_5]

Since the early 1990s, the pace of educational reform in Hong Kong has accelerated and broadened to incorporate almost all areas of schooling. The reforms introduced during this period can be subsumed under what has generally been labelled the quality movement. In this paper, we review and comment on a number of policy reform initiatives in the four areas of "Quality Education," English Language Benchmarking, Initial Teacher Training and the Integration of Pupils with Special Needs into Ordinary Classrooms. Following a brief description of each policy initiative, the reforms are discussed in terms of their consistency, coherence and cultural fit.
[Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives is the property of College of Education, Arizona State University.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/]

This study sought to assess the viability of the use of a self-report checklist identifying different aspects of giftedness in a sample of 192 Chinese secondary students from a multiple intelligences perspective. For comparison, IQ, creativity, and leadership characteristics of these students were also assessed using conventional standardized measures. Data on academic achievement in Chinese language, English language, and mathematics were obtained from school records. While students perceived the seven intelligences as relatively distinct abilities, these self-estimates of the seven intelligences did not generally predict the conventional measures, suggesting that the seven intelligences and the conventional measures provided independent and possibly complementary information on aspects of giftedness. The implications of the development of a profile of strengths and weaknesses of students from a multiple intelligences perspective for subsequent identification and programming are discussed.
[Copyright of High Ability Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598130120084348 ]

Not long after the political transition in 1997, Hong Kong witnessed a spate of top-down education reforms that had been conceived within the neoliberal ideology of economic globalisation. Neoliberalism is particularly pervasive here, because of the underdevelopment of representative politics and of critical, social democratic discourse in society. This article examines how education has been shortchanged by these reforms that dovetail with various processes arising from neoliberalism. These processes include privatisation, managerialism and performativity within the schools, as well as standardisation and surveillance in the curriculum. While teachers experience subjection to a new form of governmental discipline, society as a whole suffers from increasing polarisation in education provision. The reinvention of a humanist education agenda is urgently called for but, unfortunately, this is fraught with great difficulties.
[Copyright of International Studies in Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620210500200142]

This paper examines some of the current metacritical perspectives to postcolonial cultural studies, and discusses an alternative cultural contextualist perspective through the case of Hong Kong cultural studies. I first demarcate between contextualist and non-contextualist metacritical perspectives as well as between political-economic and cultural-contextualist ones. Then I identify major metacritiques that are currently made against postcolonial studies, and by showing how they may be applicable to Hong Kong cultural studies, I suggest ways to re-interpret these metacritiques from a cultural sociological perspective. I shall highlight important structural characteristics of Hong Kong cultural studies, and analyse them in terms of a cultural sociology of the postcolonial intellectual field. Ultimately, I argue that the problems associated with this postcolonial intellectual field appear to originate from the hierarchical global cultural context.
[Copyright of Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095023800110046722]

This article investigates the use of metaphors for education in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's (SAR) educational reform proposals by analysis of the government's Review of Education System Reform Proposals-Consultation Document (hereafter referred to as the Consultation Document; May 2000). It discovers six or seven major metaphorical schemata for education: commodity acquisition, mechanism, building construction, a path or journey of exploration, growth and nurture, with a subschema of catering. The reforms are intended to encourage internal motivation in students that will lead to their creating knowledge and to their all-round development, and the metaphorical schemata are evaluated in terms of whether they tend to reinforce or undermine these goals. Growth/nurture and journey of exploration tend to reinforce the goals of the reforms, building construction and paths seem to be neutral or ambiguous, whereas commodity acquisition, mechanism, and catering would appear to undermine them. The article also considers the ways in which metaphorical interactions such as multivalency and literalization can lead to confused thinking and argument.
[Copyright of Metaphor & Symbol is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15327868MS1704_2 ]