The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated considerable unprecedented challenges to tertiary education in the aftermath of the mass shutdown of universities across Hong Kong since early 2020. Accordingly, shifting the traditional modalities to the online model has been opted for as the only reasonable alternative in the breakout period. It is, then, essential for educators to perceive the extent to which students’ learning attainments and experiences have been negatively impacted by these educational changes in the post-pandemic era. With the aim of examining the abrupt changes which the freshmen students’ e-learning experiences and their learning environment have undergone before and after the pandemic, the present quantitative study was conducted at a Liberal Arts Institution in Hong Kong, whose data was collected via the web-based questionnaire FYSLES, or “first-year student learning experience survey”. Quantitative analysis of responses indicated that students’ impressions and experience of liberal arts education, and students’ personalities and skills development, presented a U-shaped trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. The underlying rationale of this study is addressed to higher education policymakers to orient and add value to their safety measures, pertinent recommendations, as well as in context strategies that could be established in view of the pandemic’s detrimental effects. © 2023 by the authors.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has brought tremendous challenges to higher education teaching and learning. Much attention has been put on online course construction and delivery to ensure the effectiveness of online learning. However, higher education assessment deserves more attention as it is also significantly impacted by the sudden switch from face-to-face to online. To examine how higher education institutions responded to the challenges in higher education assessment during the pandemic, this chapter conducted a case study of postgraduate programs at Lingnan University (LU) in Hong Kong to explore an appropriate assessment framework for online learning in a liberal arts education context. Through a quantitative approach, this study surveyed taught postgraduate students to explore the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the assessment approaches applied by LU faculty members in the online and hybrid-mode classes. This case study aims to provide insights for improving higher education assessment under the pandemic crisis. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

All public-funded Hong Kong universities have explicit practices to promote integrity and prevent students’ academic dishonesty. Using the Behaviour Change Wheel as a conceptual framework, three common practices were analysed in the present study, namely, enforcement of policies to penalize dishonest acts, use of plagiarism detection software, and mandatory attendance at academic honesty workshops. Qualitative data were collected from 50 students (in 14 focus groups) and individual interviews with 18 faculty members from eight publicly-funded universities in Hong Kong. Content analyses reveal that, although the students and faculty staff endorsed punishment as an effective intervention to reduce motivation to cheat, they also believed it would not enhance motivation for honest behaviours. Plagiarism detection software might reduce opportunities to plagiarize, but students with dishonest motivations will only turn to harder-to-trace means to cheat. While demonstrating good concepts of academic honesty, a sign that academic honesty education was working, the students attributed dishonest motivation to insufficient capability to perform academic tasks, which they described as a common problem. Both students and staff opined that the solution lies in more responsive learning support and pedagogical enhancement, but that it is constrained by university policies. Copyright © 2022 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread change in people's lives across the world. Indeed, such change is especially evident in the education sector, where this global phenomenon has arguably triggered some of history's most significant advancements. In this study, we explore how the early childhood education sector in Hong Kong has coped with schooling during this period. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which players in Hong Kong's early childhood education scene had to adjust in light of dynamically changing local government guidelines and why that has led to long-term improvements. To derive meaningful conclusions from this study, we use a mixed-methods approach that relies on data collected from surveys, interviews, and case studies relevant to the topic at hand. This data is then analysed, and themes are formed through coding. We also explore teachers' feelings, technology adoption, and examples from practice to determine how schools have supported young children's education. The research demonstrates how early childhood education and care centres innovatively provide education during a crisis. Traces of success in making teaching and learning possible and meaningful are visible, even with children of a young age. Consequently, this research yields key lessons about ECE learning and teaching during crises. Copyright © 2021 The International Academic Forum.

In Hong Kong children aged 4-6 years old are taught Chinese characters writing in local preschools. Non-Chinese speaking (NCS) preschool children are affected by the differences between their mother language and Chinese when they are given similar Chinese writing exercises in the preschools. This study aimed to investigate how Chinese preschool teachers taught Chinese characters writing in local preschools and how NCS preschool children learnt to write Chinese characters in an authentic classroom. Three parts of ‘Object of Learning’ were employed in this phenomenographic study. The first part was ‘Intended Object of Learning’, in which data were collected through semi-structured interviews with participating teachers. It aimed to study the teachers’ understanding of the teaching of character writing to the preschool children. The second part was ‘Enacted Object of Learning’, whose data were recorded by the researcher about how the teachers implemented their character writing activities in the class. The third part, ‘Lived Object of Learning’ concerned how the NCS children, who were 5 to 6 years old, performed after they had experienced the character writing activities. This study investigated the mentioned experiences of teachers and NCS children of upper level in 3 local preschools. A total of 4 preschool teachers and 12 NCS preschool children participated in this present study. The time period was twice a week, especially during their daily Chinese character writing demonstration times, for twelve consecutive weeks. The researcher used various methods to collect data, including video- and audiotaping, field notes, photographic documentation, collection of lesson plans and interviews. The findings were compiled using ‘Categories of Descriptions’, which reflected the preschool teachers‟ and NCS preschool children’s ways of seeing Chinese characters writing in their daily classroom experiences. In the first part of the findings five teachers’ conceptions from their understanding

21世紀初，香港展開教育改革，教育統籌局為保證各中小學的教學水準，定期到校進行校外評核的工作。工作完成後，教育統籌局把這些校外評核報告上載互聯網，供市民瀏覽。本研究是從2003至2005兩個年度，教育統籌局在網上公佈的校外評核報告中，各隨機抽取10所小學的報告，針對這些報告中老師在有關教與學和評估不足的評語，提出教學有明確的目標，訓練學生的語文能力，有質素的提問，照顧學生的學習差異，全體學生的參與，師生互動，設計一份優質的評估，善用評估得來的數據以改善教學等解決問題的建議和策略，並提供具體的操作方法，以落實課改的理念，提高教學的成效。 At the beginning of the 21st century, education reforms were launched in Hong Kong. The Education and Manpower Bureau regularly went to schools for off-campus assessments to ensure the teaching level of all primary and secondary schools. After the work is completed, the Education and Manpower Bureau uploads these external assessment reports to the Internet for public viewing. This study randomly selected 10 elementary schools reports published by the Education and Manpower Bureau from2003 to 2005. Targeting the comments on teaching, learning and assessment, this study proposes some suggestion and strategies such as a clear goal in the teaching, training of students’ language skills, high-quality questions, attention paid to students’ learning differences, participation of all students, teacher-student interaction, a high-quality assessment design, and making good use of assessed data to improve teaching so at to implement the concept of curriculum reform and improve the effectiveness of teaching. Copyright © 2018 合肥師範學院.

The concept of “Assessment-of-Learning” (AoL) has long been the tradition in most school assessment practices in Hong Kong. In view of the deficiencies in the assessment mechanism, the Education Commission (2000) recommended “Assessment-for-Learning” (AfL) as one of the major areas of action in the current education reform. This paper reports the outcomes of a research study designed to investigate the practice of assessment for learning by Hong Kong teachers. The project was a collaborative one, involving the School Development and Evaluation Team (SDET) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and teachers from 20 kindergartens. In the project, central seminars, workshops and meetings were provided to the participating schools for the purpose of enhancing teachers’ Assessment for Learning (A fL) competency in their daily teaching. A questionnaire of 60 items was administered twice to teachers from the participating kindergartens at the beginning as well as towards the end of the project in order to assess their uses of the nine AfL strategies, namely, informing teaching objectives, informing success criteria, effective questioning, quality feedback, self-assessment, peer assessment, collecting learning evidence and teacher reflections in their daily teaching. Results indicate that there is a remarkable improvement regarding teachers’ habits in utilizing AfL strategies after the intervention. This research has pioneered a quantitative study of the practice of AfL in kindergartens and has validated an instrument for assessing such a practice. The framework, the instrument, the findings and insights generated from the study may have significant contributions to the improvement of classroom teaching in kindergartens. Copyright © 2014 ICSEI.

Although Hong Kong students perform quite well in international performance measurements such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), there are issues concerning the significant differences between the newly immigrated students and the local students, the gender differences and variation of performances among schools and within schools. Indeed, learning diversity has become an important issue as students come from many different families and with various backgrounds. In order to provide students with equal opportunities to learn, the new senior secondary school curriculum has set out a new direction for catering to students’ learning diversity. The major design of the new curriculum is to offer more electives and enhance student choices. It is also intended to be implemented with flexible teaching strategies and a school-based curriculum and assessment. How this can be done has posed a big challenge to schools and teachers. This paper aims to explore how the newly implemented curriculum can cater to learning diversity in greater depth.

In order to pilot a shift towards greater use of collaborative learning in the university's higher education programs, the University of Hong Kong has invested in the development of a prototype technology-enhanced collaborative learning space. The space was created by retrofitting a vacant studio, turning it into an innovative classroom space in which collaborative learning is promoted and facilitated both through the provision of technology and by the physical layout of the room. The space has been used to pioneer collaborative learning both by holding professional development workshops for faculty in the room and also by helping academic staff to run experimental courses in the learning space. The opportunity to offer professional development and support for academic staff in this environment is particularly valuable as it ensures they do not simply deliver traditional didactic lectures in a space designed to promote interactive student learning and engagement. By using the space as a 'student' they are able to consider how they may use collaborative learning environments with their students. This article describes use of the room for professional development of academic staff and also provides two examples of the use and evaluation of the room by faculty who used the room to teach experimental classes in an undergraduate environmental studies course, and a graduate-level education course. In all instances it was found that the innovative classroom space stimulated new practices, both on the part of the teachers and students, and was key an an increased collaborative student-centred natures of all courses taught in the room.
[Copyright of Higher Education Research & Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2013.777033]