From September 2009 onwards, a new business curriculum which focuses on three key business disciplines, namely management, accounting and finance, has been implemented in Hong Kong senior secondary schools. A new assessment guide has been also proposed in light of the new curriculum. Such business curriculum and assessment reform move in the direction of preparing pupils to be more adaptive to the fast-changing business society; an innovative school-based pedagogical design will definitely be needed. This paper examines and analyzes the nature of the existing Hong Kong business curriculum and assessment reform from a competence-based perspective, discusses the critical issues in the areas of curriculum design, assessment practices, teaching approaches and teacher development, and suggests innovations in these areas for enhancing pupil competence development in the context of Hong Kong senior secondary education.
[Copyright of Journal of Vocational Education and Training is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636821003605387]

This study was originally designed to explore the impact of a distributed approach to developing curriculum leadership among schoolteachers. Previous papers have focused on reporting evidence of teacher learning in the process of engaging teachers in various types of curriculum decision-making in an innovation project based on interview data. This article reports a discourse analysis of the interactions based on the visual data in videotaped meetings between teachers in a Chinese curriculum development team and shows that teacher participation is constrained by the leadership styles of the positional leaders in the team in the second action cycle in the project. The mediational effects of the leadership styles invite policy-makers and school management to rethink the effectiveness of school-based approaches to curriculum development in enhancing teacher learning and development.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2010.504577]

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly reviewed, with emphasis on the cognitive characteristics of dyslexia and its manifestations, in the hope that understanding the profiles of students with dyslexia may help to lay a solid foundation for assessment, curriculum development and intervention. Recent progress in the study of the cognitive deficits of Chinese-speaking readers with dyslexia in Hong Kong and the development of assessment and intervention framework for early identification and intervention is presented. These developments shed light on dyslexia in the Chinese language and provide grounds for further work on research and practice.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404158.2010.495830]

2009年實施的新高中學制，通識教育科將成為核心科目之一，大部份中學現階段的工作主要集中處理課程規劃中如何鋪排六個單元的教授次序。學校的教師人手安排固然影響通識科的課程組織，但老師們如何詮釋課程同樣影響校本的課程設計。本文透過校本專業支援的學校經驗，嘗試總結課程規劃的三個單元鋪排模式，並探討當中反映老師如何理解新高中通識教育科課程精神與目標。
Liberal Studies (LS) is one of the core subjects in the new structure of senior secondary education which will be implemented from this September. At present, the focus of most secondary schools is on the issue of how to plan and arrange the sequence of the six modules. In fact, not only the manpower deployment but also how teachers interpret the LS curriculum documents can bring considerable influence on the school-based curriculum design of LS. Through the experiences of on-site school support, this paper summarizes three models which schools adopted to arrange the six modules, and analyses teachers’ understanding and interpretation of LS curriculum embedded in each model.
[Copyright of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre Journal is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Centre at http://www.edb.org.hk/hktc]

This essay explores the nature of the curriculum content of liberal studies--a core school subject in the new senior secondary curriculum in Hong Kong--with reference to the curriculum- making processes entailed in the formation of that subject. The central thesis is that a school subject is introduced to schools and classrooms as a distinct representation of content embodied in curriculum materials, entailing a theory of content--a special way of selecting, organizing, and framing the content for social, cultural, educational, curricular, and pedagogical purposes. Knowing the content of a school subject thus entails knowing more than the content per se; it entails an understanding of the underlying theory of content, which is necessary for disclosing and realizing the educational potential embodied in the content.
[Copyright of Journal of Curriculum Studies is the property of Routledge . Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270902767311]