Following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region developed wide-ranging curriculum reforms, including project learning. A recent survey has indicated that over 80% of Hong Kong primary and secondary schools have adopted project learning as a curriculum task. Such an outcome is hard to reconcile both with the culture of Hong Kong schools and the generally bleak picture that pervades the literature on educational change.In seeking an explanation for this apparent success we focus attention on the policy instruments that were used by government agencies to facilitate the process of implementation. Our analysis revealed that teachers were caught in a pincer movement that involved voluntary activities promoting project learning and coercive measures that monitored and evaluated successful implementation. Teachers' views of these policy instruments differed markedly from those of policymakers. This confluence of mixed approaches, while apparently successful, is also shown to be problematic. Finally, the paper is located in a theoretical framework with its origins in recent policy theory that to date has not been applied to educational contexts.
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Students in the Physiotherapy Programme carried out a group project in their final year of studies. The objectives of the project were that the students learn and appreciate the process and activities involved in research, acquire deeper understanding of a topic in their professional interest, learn to work as a team, manage their own time, collaborate with others and produce a meaningful report. In the case of group work, usually the written report is assessed and the same mark is given to all members. Sometimes the supervisors' and group members' assessment of the members' involvement and participation in the project, oral presentation or viva voce contributes a small portion to the final grade of each student. This practice is limited to the assessment of the outcome of the group effort and does not reflect the process of learning by individual members. Portfolio assessment of learning involves the students themselves reflecting on and evaluating their learning and also allows teachers to evaluate individual students' learning in group tasks. In this paper, the implementation of the portfolio assessment, the criteria for the assessment of the portfolios and the students' opinions on the portfolio assessment are discussed.
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