This article explores the changing educational landscape in Hong Kong prior to and following its transition to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It does this through an analysis of the rise and fall of a specific curriculum reform, the Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), which straddled the political reunification. The article draws on a range of published research and evaluation projects and the analysis focusses on the four key elements of public policy, namely the origins, the nature, the policy actions used and its impact on practice.
[Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930110100036]

Private supplementary tutoring has long been a major phenomenon in parts of East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. In recent times it has grown dramatically in other parts of Asia and in Africa, Europe and North America. The factors underlying the growth of private tutoring vary, but in all settings it has major implications for learning and livelihood. Families with the necessary resources are able to secure not only greater quantities but also better qualities of private tutoring. Children receiving such tutoring are then able to perform better in school, and in the long run to improve their lifetime earnings. By contrast, children of low‐income families who do not receive such benefits may not be able to keep up with their peers and may drop out of school at an earlier age. Tutoring also of course has a direct impact on the livelihoods of the tutors, providing employment and incomes for a range of professionals and amateurs of different age groups. The dynamics of inter‐relationships are complex, and vary from one setting to another. This paper argues that private supplementary tutoring deserves much more attention from policy makers and researchers.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920601024974]

Despite the advantages of problem based learning (PBL) and the fact that it has been utilised for some time in conventional higher education settings, it is not widely used in distance education in Hong Kong. Recently, a small group of course co-ordinators at the Open University of Hong Kong engaged in a series of action learning projects to explore ways in which it could be incorporated into their courses. The purpose of this paper is to report the opinions of these academics about the suitability of PBL for a distance education environment. Generally, they concluded that it is possible, and perhaps desirable, to consider implementing PBL as one learning approach. However, most of the projects focussed on a fairly narrow application of PBL, namely in face-to-face tutorials. The limitations of the participants' interpretations are discussed in the light of the constraints they face, and some recommendations are made for other ways of implementing PBL into distance education.
[Copyright of Distance Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0158791000210206]

This paper reports a questionnaire study conducted with a group of 87 pre-teenage children (age 11-12 years) in Hong Kong to show their vernacular perception and experience of maps before they began formal mapwork learning in their first year of secondary education. This study reveals major findings that these pre- teenage children see the main purpose of using maps is to find unfamiliar places and to locate them in most everyday situations. As a result, they like to deal with practical, real maps such as street maps and the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) transport maps where the above- mentioned practical map purpose can be achieved. Most of these pre- teenage children are aware of maps available in their surroundings. However, they may not be observant enough to notice or pay attention to reading them carefully. It is rather a matter of map awareness that puts these pre-teenage children into the two broad groups of map and non-map- users. It also revealed that even those pre-teenage children who claimed to be non- map-users demonstrated some intuitive superficial understanding of simple map concepts and elements. Teachers are strongly encouraged to tap into the intuitions and experiences possessed by pre-teenage children in order to develop their map interest further in geography lessons and to make the understanding of maps a practical life skill for them to master.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382049908667586 ]

Procedural and conceptual knowledge for solving a basic quantitative problem in chemistry by expert and novice secondary school students is reported. Experts use a known qualitative procedure with a working forwards strategy to obtain a numerical solution. Novices attempt a means-ends analysis strategy which is often unsuccessful, so switch to a simple formula-driven working forwards strategy to obtain a numerical solution, the qualitative procedure being either omitted or only partially formed. A gradual shift in strategies and representations used as expertise increases was observed. Differences with findings for problem solving in physics were also found. Experts' conceptual knowledge is accurate and linked to underlying procedural knowledge, whereas novices have misconceptions and a poor understanding of formulae. Conceptual understanding, use of a qualitative procedure, and the type of strategy used, are major differences between experts and novices. Instructional techniques are suggested in these areas to enhance problem solving and teaching.
[Copyright of International Journal of Science Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095006999290787]