Since the 19th century, Chinese societies, as latecomers to modernization, have prioritized Western learning. Modelled on European and North American experiences, modern universities were created to serve this purpose. Having little linkage to their indigenous cultural traditions, they operate in Confucian socio-cultural contexts, with constant and longstanding struggles with their cultural identity. In recent decades, these societies have progressed remarkably well in higher education. Their experience could be seen as a cultural experiment that is placed highly on their sustainable development agendas. The products of their modern education systems especially at the elite level have demonstrated a grasp of both traditional and Western knowledge, with their very best universities well positioned to combine Chinese and Western ideas of a university in everyday operation. Such a bi-cultural condition contrasts sharply to the still largely mono-cultural (Western only) university operating environment in the West. The integration opens further space for their universities to explore an alternative to the Western academic model that has long dominated world higher education. Based on fieldwork at premier universities in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei, this article calls for a reconceptualized view of modern university development in Chinese societies. It argues that the experiment enables their top universities to bring back their cultural traditions to integrate with Western values and contribute to inter-civilizational dialogue.
[Copyright of Frontiers of Education in China is the property of Springer Singapore.]

This article analyses an assessment initiative known as the Basic Competency Assessment (BCA) in Hong Kong using Bernstein's performance and competence models of pedagogic practice. On the one hand, BCA is aligned with a competence model through its official projection as a low-stakes, student-focussed and formative assessment. However, an examination of the public perception of and context for BCA reveals its high-stakes, disciplines-centred and summative nature; it is argued that BCA reflects a performance model with strong classification, strong framing and visible pedagogies. The example of Hong Kong illustrates the usefulness of Bernstein's theory and extends the existing research on the interactions between local culture and pedagogic practices.
[Copyright of British Journal of Educational Studies is the property of Routledge.]

Many Hong Kong Chinese parents believe that music training enhances the academic achievement of their children. The current study investigates the relationship between the extent and outcome of students' music training, their perceptions of the value of the subjects they study and their academic achievement. A total of 286 students in Primary 4, 5 and 6 from one school in Hong Kong reported the extent and outcome of their music training, including the number of instruments they studied, the number of years spent training, highest grade and highest level achieved. For value, students completed a subscale of the Achievement Task Value Questionnaire to measure their "liking and interest," perceived "importance" and "usefulness" of their school subjects. A nested structural equation model showed that, for both boys and girls, the extent and outcome of music training positively predicts academic achievement in Chinese, English and mathematics. Furthermore, the model shows that for both boys and girls, students' perceived value of their school subjects negatively predicts academic achievement in Chinese, and age has a direct and negative effect on mathematics achievement. For girls, age positively moderates the extent and outcome of music training on academic achievement whereas the moderator effect of age on students' perceived value of academic subjects is non-significant. For boys, in contrast, the moderator effect of age on extent and outcome of music training is non-significant, whereas its effect on students' perceived value of academic subjects is negative. In broad terms, the results show that parents are justified in believing that music training is positively related to academic achievement. However, the results differ for boys and girls in connection to the role of age in this relationship.
[Copyright of Research Studies in Music Education is the property of Sage Publications Ltd.]

The relationship between history education and political education in Asian societies is an underexplored topic. Politics have deeply shaped the development of history education in Hong Kong, as in many other societies around the world. Hong Kong history education reforms have been criticized for providing a new form of national political education. This study examines how politic education can be found in the Hong Kong history curriculum as 'latent content'. To do so, it provides a qualitative content analysis of all textual data used in 'Chinese history' and 'history' textbooks in secondary schools in Hong Kong which discuss or portray political content, focusing particularly on the themes of identity shaping and assimilation. Before focusing on the Hong Kong situation, this paper first explores how history education is a political topic in general. Then Hong Kong's complicated political legacy is described in relation to one of the unique features of history education there: the concurrence of two subjects, 'history' and 'Chinese history'. Current debates about the reform of history education in Hong Kong and the limitations of current history education in Hong Kong are examined in the next part, using data from textbooks. Our analysis shows that 1) national identity is prioritized over local identity in the textbooks, and 2) the textbooks mainly reflect a Mainland-based majority perspective and justify assimilation in history, resulting in a lack of recognition of the many different minority groups of Mainland China, of which Hong Kong people may see themselves as part. Based on the analysis, we argue that history education in Hong Kong provides a narrow political education that can impede some crucial education goals in Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook is the property of Japanese Educational Research Association.]

This article draws on a cultural-historical theorisation of child development alongside the Chinese concept of learning in order to study children's development in the Hong Kong Australian community in Melbourne, Australia. In particular, it aims to understand in detail how a 9-year-old child develops a learning motive under highly structured family practices. The data analysed were selected from a larger set of data involving 80 hours of video observations generated from the recording of everyday practices in three Hong Kong immigrant families. The findings indicate that encouragement plays an important role in bridging the gap between parental demands and the child's wishes, which assists the child to appropriate family values, thus facilitating the development of a learning motive and learning itself.
[Copyright of Mind, Culture, and Activity is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher’s website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2011.634941]

Social and emotional dynamics have an impact on students' learning processes in online-learning situations. This study explores university students' emotions and trust levels resulting from collaborative communication behaviors when they interacted as part of a Food and Tourism course in Taiwan and Hong Kong. More specifically, students' emotions and trust levels were investigated and were founded to have varied over the course of the study. Results show that the Taiwan-based participants seemed to express their emotions more strongly than the Hong Kong-based ones. Both the Hong Kong and Taiwan groups generally felt satisfied, excited and curious, whereas they were sometimes perceived to be dispirited, insecure and angry while the project was in progress and at the end of the project. The three sources that caused most emotional comment were "self", "social" and "others". When it came to dealing with emotion, most students tried to solve problems by themselves. They believed that they had the ability to solve the problems and held themselves responsible for dealing with their own emotions. The pair trust survey shows that both groups gave positive responses for all items, but there seemed to be a gap between the perception of pair trust and the reality of dealing with emotion.
[Copyright of TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology is the property of TOJET.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.tojet.net/]

This study uses discourse theory to explore the teaching identities of a group of mainland Chinese pre-service teachers of English in a teacher education institute in Hong Kong. Exploring how the teaching identities are discursively constructed, the study reaches two conclusions. First, that the pre-service teachers negotiate their own positions within multiple positionings from peers, students on the teaching practicum and the broader enterprise of professional language teaching in Hong Kong