The Hong Kong government has sought to encourage environmental education (EE) in schools. However, little is known about how government and private initiatives impact at the level of the kindergarten. This article, based on a small-scale study, investigates what is happening in Hong Kong kindergartens in EE. The findings show that there have been positive changes in EE in Hong Kong kindergartens in the last decade: more hands-on environmental activities and resourcefulness of teachers in sourcing teaching materials. Teachers and parents were found to have positive attitudes. However, teachers had to tackle the following issues: the overloaded school curriculum and isolated environmental learning experience, teacher's insecurity and inadequate knowledge of EE, weakness of government support in terms of formal teacher training programmes and funding on EE.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430802181361]

Many studies show that teacher beliefs strongly influence their instructional decisions, which in turn affect classroom practice and curriculum implementation. Studies also reveal many curriculum reforms in the past failed because teacher beliefs had been neglected in the design and implementation process.
The new secondary Chinese language curriculum implemented in 2002 in Hong Kong is of student-centred basis, and thus teachers are required to change their beliefs. This qualitative study aims at investigating teaching beliefs of Chinese language teachers and their influence on curriculum implementation. By examining teaching beliefs of teachers, light can be shed on the problems and prospect of curriculum implementation. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observations. Twelve teachers were selected purposefully from three different types of secondary schools, namely band 1, 2 and 3; which represent different range of students' academic competency. In each type of school, two expert teachers and two novice teachers with a variety of educational backgrounds and rankings at school were selected.
The results of this study indicate that teaching beliefs of teachers and their teaching behaviours are interrelated. It also highlights that the existing beliefs of transmission-oriented teachers are incongruent with the underlying philosophy of the new curriculum. This may hinder the implementation of the intended curriculum. But most of the beliefs held by the heuristics-oriented teachers are in line with the intended curriculum, which is likely to facilitate its successful implementation. The findings also have important implications for curriculum developers and teacher educators: curriculum implementation must be accompanied by continuous teacher development which fosters changes of beliefs and practices.
This study finds out that there are underlying commonalities in beliefs among the twelve teachers. In their opinion, the conception

Over the last decade, educational reformers in Hong Kong have targeted teacher development and learning as a key area of need. As part of this movement, different external change agencies began developing partnerships with school as attempts to enhance the quality of teacher professional development. Such partnerships have operated for a number of years, but, to date, their efficacy has been largely unexplored. This research, taking teachers' implementation of project learning as an example, aims to explore the impact of teacher-change agency partnerships on teacher learning. The study is important in helping educators to better understand the difficulties teachers face when engaging in changes and also teachers' learning need. This research also reveals the effects of teacher-change agency partnership and its impact on teacher learning. This study can shed lights on ways of curriculum change and teacher development.
The research posed four questions: (1) What difficulties do teachers face while carrying out project learning in school? (2) What kind of learning did teachers experience while involved in the teacher-change agency partnership? (3) Within the context of educational change, did teacher-change agency partnerships have an impact on teacher learning? (4) What do teacher-change agencies need to consider if partnership is to achieve positive results?
Five experienced primary school teachers were involved in the study. In-depth interviews and non-participatory observation were used to collect data. Based on thick description of five cases individually and a comprehensive comparison among them, the research revealed: (1) Teacher trainers need to take a multi-dimensional view to study the difficulties teachers encountered in implementing reform initiatives; (2) Teacher learning should take account of both "teacher" and "learning". The research highlighted that teacher professional development and personal growth are closely interrelated; (3) In different

In the recent years, students' engagement has been the focus of concern in the US. Various studies have found that students' academic performances were directly affected by students' engagement. In Hong Kong, research on this topic has not yet been found. This research aimed to find out how the behaviors of three primary school English teachers' affect their students' engagements. The teachers were observed on how they presented their lessons on one of the units of the textbooks. Each teacher chose three students as samples of this research. Ways of data collection included: lesson observation, video-taping of classroom teaching, in-class tape-recording of the sample students, and interviewing the teachers and sample students.
The findings of this research perceived the following six behaviors that were of vital importance to students' engagement: (1) Providing learning opportunities for students, (2) Roles of teachers, (3) Student-teacher dialogue, (4) Teachers' demand on students' understanding of what they have been taught, (5) Teachers' self-reflection while teaching, and (6) Teachers' expectations on students.
There are three aspects of engagements: affective engagement, behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement. Students display different levels of engagements due to their teachers' behaviors while teaching. This research found that students' behavioral engagement is associated with superficial affective engagement but does not necessarily correlate with cognitive engagement. On the other hand, cognitive engagement is closely associated with profound affective engagement. It was also found that students' engagement is influenced by the following psychological factors: (1) autonomy, competence and relatedness of the Self Determination Theory, (2) self-efficacy, and (3) students' learning goal orientation. In order to elevate students' engagement, teachers have to provide learning opportunities at a suitable level of difficulties for the students and

This study is concerned with aspects of decentralization of curriculum development, a complex educational phenomenon, in Japan and Hong Kong. By introducing fieldwork and the case study research method, it hopes to yield a general understanding of the above phenomenon as reflected in the contexts of selected programs in curriculum reform, namely, (1) Project Learning and SBeD in Hong Kong, and (2) Integrated Learning in Japan, at junior levels of secondary school. In its research design, the objectives are to investigate and compare the broad trends and features in the rationale, practices and processes, and implications of reform in the locations studied. Trends of decentralization of curriculum development, in recent curriculum reforms in Japan and Hong Kong, indicated a strong policy interest in promoting specific essential skills and qualities through partial devolution of curricular control to schools. Most of these programs have multiple educational aims directed at either particular policy emphases or local school conditions, or both.
The practices and processes designed to bring about this change toward decentralization of curriculum development differed in the cases of Japan and Hong Kong. At the policy and system level, the levels of government involvement and commitment were not the same. Japan, through a combination of direct measures at the initiation stage and a longer-term policy of minimalist intervention, legitimized schools' autonomy over curriculum development decisions in the reformed programs, while Hong Kong, being traditionally less centralized and less effective with the power-coercive approach in curriculum planning, adopted more indirect strategies of exhortation and inducement while allowing schools full freedom over their own approach and priorities toward the specific reformed school curricula. In terms of school support systems, Japan seemed to be less prepared with the provision of practice guidelines, professional support and

This study attempts to understand how students construct their knowledge in a new learning environment guided by constructivist learning principles as well as to find out whether such environment can produce a deeper learning outcome than one that is based on existing mode of classroom teaching.
A constructivist learning environment includes such crucial elements as intentional learning, active, authentic and cooperative learning. This involves using information technology to build up learning community as well as encourage learners to obtain information for knowledge construction.
A quasi-experimental design was employed. The experimental group comprised of 16 students taking a Social Policy Issues course via an online learning environment while the comparison group comprised of 18 students attending the same course in the existing classroom teaching. All students came from the same class studying in the final year of the BSW program of the University of Hong Kong. Background information indicated that the two groi.lps of students were largely, homogeneous.
The outcome indicates that students had a positive evaluation of the online learning environment. However, the learning outcome analyzed by the SOLO Taxonomy does not show any significant difference. The students with better performance are more active in logging on the online course and post more messages on the bulletin board.
Patterns of students' participation in the bulletin board discussion were analyzed Students were enthusiastic in the beginning and the more active students tended to remain so throughout the course. Quality of postings improved with time on each discussion topic. Quite a few students reported that they preferred reading others' postings than giving their opinions. Teachers' roles were investigated. Giving encouragement, asking short and thought provoking questions and summarizing students' discussion were considered important for students' learning.
The study suggests