Despite its popularity in other countries, like America and Canada, peer editing is considered quite 'avant-garde' in the Hong Kong academic community and has never been a common practice in local secondary schools' classrooms. This paper will try to unveil the reasons why a number of Hong Kong English teachers are reluctant to use peer-editing. It is hypothesized that any positive experience of peer editing among teachers themselves is an impetus to use peer editing in class. Based on this hypothesis, a brief survey was carried out to examine a group of fifteen student-teachers' attitudes who had taken a second language writing course in a graduate school's setting, in which peer-editing activities of each other's work over six weeks, in six one-hour blocks, were conducted. Reservations concerning adopting peer-editing were observed among the student-teachers' future classes. All forms of resistance and reservations, according to the participants, were claimed to derive from external constraints. A closer look, however, suggests that none of these given constraints were purely external. Rather, I believe these teachers might have either been prejudiced or neglected 'locus of control', which refers to the possible control and power a teacher possess over their classes. This paper looks at both the teachers' personalities, characterized by skeptical beliefs in peer-editing, and the external constraints from the local social situations that contribute to the resistance and reluctance of teachers implementing peer editing in Hong Kong's education institutions.
[Copyright of English Language Teaching is the property of Canadian Center of Science and Education.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/index]

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]

An attempt was made to formulate a theoretical framework of leadership forces in school organisations, which includes bureaucratic linkage, cultural linkage, tight coupling and loose coupling. Two instruments, the School Values Inventory (SVI) and the Teachers' School Life Questionnaire (TSLQ), were created and developed for this study to assess the administrative values espoused by principals and teachers' feelings about school life. Based on data collected from 1395 teachers from a randomly selected sample of 39 secondary schools in Hong Kong, the four scales of leadership forces in secondary schools were confirmed. Findings show that cultural linkage and loose coupling were the most effective leadership forces to bind people together within schools, tight coupling the next, but the use of bureaucratic linkage was controversial.
[Copyright of School Leadership & Management is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2010.502525]

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of teachers' professional knowledge construction in Assessment for Learning (hereafter, AfL). It presents a qualitative study of a school-based AfL Project which took place in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Thirty lessons video-recorded in the AfL Project and nine teacher interviews conducted after the Project were analyzed. The findings enrich our understanding of professional knowledge construction in four aspects: (1) personal nature of teachers' practical knowledge construction in contrived situations; (2) confined integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge in terms of 'skill progression that accompanies experience'; (3) more sophisticated integration of AfL into pedagogical content knowledge as 'practicalizing theoretical knowledge'; and (4) reflection, conscious deliberation, and 'theorizing practical knowledge' associated with more sophisticated professional knowledge integration. Implications for enhancing teachers' professional learning are discussed.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2010.517683]

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned about the growing number of ethnic minority students. How they are supported and how the diversity of their pastoral needs is fulfilled become critical. This article examines teachers', students' and parents' narratives of the cross-cultural experience of ethnic minority students from India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nepal and Thailand, and the diversity of those students' pastoral needs. The qualitative data were collected from interviews, through which the constructs of 32 teachers and 32 students from three secondary schools were explored. Four groups of focus-group interviews were conducted, in which 15 parents were involved. This article argues that to implement the ethos of caring, it is not only necessary for the school to promote the intercultural sensitivity of all practitioners, but equally important to develop a connected school system where ethnic minority students and parents can be consistently supported in the subsystems of classroom, school and home.
[Copyright of Educational Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055690903425383]

This article reports the move from paper-based marking (PBM) to onscreen marking (OSM) in Hong Kong for the subject Liberal Studies - whose objectives involve broadening students' horizons through critical examination of current issues. While currently a small candidature subject of approximately 3300, from 2009, the subject will become compulsory for all students in Hong Kong's senior secondary school curriculum with a candidature of 80,000. As marking of all public examinations in Hong Kong is migrating to OSM, the current study reports on a project with the entire 2009 Year 13 Liberal Studies marking panel (49 markers), as part of the OSM validation process. The study involved giving all markers both a pre-marking and a post-marking questionnaire to gauge markers' technological competence in and attitudes towards OSM. Results were positive in that markers generally rated themselves as technologically capable. With regard to attitudes towards the implementation of OSM, the outcomes of the post-marking questionnaire showed markers to be more positive than their pre-marking comments suggested. Nonetheless, they are still not happy about having to travel to special marking centres and the preference for PBM remains strong. The results of the study indicate that OSM is being accepted into marker psyche of what marking involves, an important step as OSM is adopted as the sole marking method for all subjects in Hong Kong from 2012 onwards.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2010.495836]