In November 1998, the Hong Kong Government published the policy document entitled "Information Technology for Learning in a New Era Five-Year Strategy 1998/99 to 2002/03" and defined the goals and the scope of the development of Information Technology in education in Hong Kong. One of the goals is to encourage using Information Technology (I.T.) in education and to promote students' ability in handling information. As the role of I.T. is becoming more and more important in education, schools themselves have also implemented I.T. to various extents. The main purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of the external environment on the development of I.T. in Hong Kong primary schools and examine also the relationship between the use of I.T. in education and teaching effectiveness in Hong Kong primary schools.
This study uses a quantitative approach to achieve the above purposes. Questionnaires were sent to 823 teachers from 25 Hong Kong primary schools to solicit their views on the impact of I.T. in school education, the use of I.T. education and their perceptions of teaching effectiveness.
The School Environment Constraint Instrument developed by Lam (1989) was adopted to meet the context of Hong Kong primary schools and modified for this study. Two new factors "New Arrivals" and "Language Policy" are used to replace the original factors of 'Ethnicity' and 'Second Language'. The other two research instruments which measured "Information Technology Development" and "Teaching Effectiveness" were developed by the Researcher.
The results of the research indicate that: (1) the "Policy" factor and "Funding" factor had a high, significant correlation with the different aspects of I.T. development of Hong Kong primary schools; (2) a school with well-developed I.T. had a positive significant correlation with "Teaching Effectiveness".
Recommendations have been made for school administrators' consideration in the development of I.T. systems in primary

This dissertation consists of three studies which addressed the issue of describing creativity and enhancing creativity in Chinese writing among primary school students in Hong Kong. Although creativity is valued in the Curriculum Reform of Hong Kong, the degree to which creativity is incorporated into teaching by Chinese Language teachers was unknown. Study One addressed this issue by a survey using a tailor-designed 14-item questionnaire conducted among 449 Chinese Language teachers in primary schools to tap the respondents' perceptions of creativity, perceived ways of developing students' creativity, and their day-to-day practice of writing in classrooms. The results show that most of the teacher respondents conformed to the traditional method of teaching writing. Results suggested a detailed study to enhance teacher's skills in teaching creativity in Chinese which formed the foundation for Study Three. With Study One as the foundation, distinctions between Eastern and Western perspectives of creativity may be explored in future. Study Two was the development and validation of the Chinese Creative Writing Scale (CCWS) that was later applied as an outcome measure for creative writing in Chinese language in Study Three. The development of CCWS contributes to the measurement of creative writing in Chinese. With its good internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and construct validity, it can be used as an outcome measure for assessing the effectiveness of enhancing creativity in Chinese writing. With minor modifications, the scale can be applied in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Chinese societies elsewhere in the world. In Study Three, we first developed four learning studies using the phenomenographic approach and the Theory of Variation. To test the effect of the learning study approach, a quasi-experimental trial was then conducted in a primary school in Hong Kong. Four teachers joined the learning study for one academic year. Some 277 students were randomly allocated

This study examined the roles of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, measured using twelve different tasks hypothesized to indicate these four broad constructs, in Chinese character recognition and English word reading among 536 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners, second- and fifth-graders. The twelve tasks generally showed an increase in performance with grade level. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these four constituents of Chinese word reading revealed a dynamic pattern of children's latent linguistic or reading processing skills development: The best-fitting model of kindergartners' processing was one that included two broad constructs, broadly termed metalinguistic processing and orthographic processing. In contrast, second-graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to four distinct skills of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. Finally, the latent processing skills of the fifth-graders converged into phonological and orthographic processing. The contributions of each of these initially specified constructs, i.e., sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, to Chinese word reading varied across each separate grade in regression analyses. The sub-character processing construct was uniquely associated with kindergarten Chinese word reading only. In contrast, the morphological awareness construct was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in both second- and fifth-graders. The orthographic knowledge construct was uniquely associated with word reading across ail three grades. However, the phonological awareness construct was not uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in any of the groups of children, though it was uniquely associated with English word reading, even with Chinese character recognition skill statistically controlled. These findings