Teaching assistants (TAs) play an influential role in primary and secondary schools. But there is an absence in literature about the TA’s efficacy, and to date no instrument is available for measuring TA’s efficacy. The present study aims to develop and validate a scale (Teaching Assistant Efficacy Scale, TAES) for measuring TA’s efficacy on identified capabilities. A total of 531 teaching assistants from Hong Kong schools participated in the survey. The multidimensional Rasch model was used to analyse the data. The results revealed that a 5-dimension structure of TA’s efficacy was supported. The final 30-item version of TAES assesses TA’s efficacy on learning support, teaching support, behaviour management, cooperation, and administrative support. The Rasch reliabilities for all five dimensions were around 0.90. The 6-category response structure worked well for the scale. Further research was recommended to validate and test the robustness of the TAES both in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Research on Hong Kong pre-service teachers’ concerns and their perception about effective teaching is meager. Thus, this author tried to help fill the knowledge gap by conducting a survey that involved the use of an open-ended, semi-structured questionnaire administered to 106 student teachers. The key findings are, firstly, three types of concerns were identified: the "Self", "Task", and "Impact" concerns. Secondly, the "Self" concerns constitute the largest proportion of concerns identified by the 106 student teachers; in this category, the most important concerns as ranked by these pre-service teachers are class discipline, acceptance by pupils, and teachers’ mastery of subject knowledge and teaching skill. And thirdly, the concerns are also closely related to such factors as subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and teacher pupils’ relationship that the student teachers considered important for effective teaching. The principal conclusions are that teacher education programs in Hong Kong have room for improvement in catering for the needs of pre-service teachers, and that teacher educators need to help reduce pre-service teachers’ concerns so as to facilitate their professional development.
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Teacher efficacy has been shown to be an important variable predicting teachers' capacity to contribute to reform efforts. Given the role that future teachers are expected to play in educational reform, this research aimed to measure the teacher efficacy of samples of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong and Macao using the Chinese version of the 12-item Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale (C-TSE). A cross-cultural perspective was important because it provided that opportunity to test the robustness of the instrument and to look at broader socio-cultural issues of teacher efficacy in two locations through the use of C-TSE. Sixty-six Hong Kong pre-service teachers and 66 Macao pre-service teachers participated in the study. In general, Hong Kong pre-service teachers were found to be more efficacious than the Macao cohort. However, the factor structures of the scale were not the same for the sub-samples. It is suggested that, on the one hand, programme characteristics and/or local cultures need to be considered when interpreting these results. On the other hand, the full 24-item scale, with more items that envisage and reflect particular classroom tasks and situations, could be useful to explore the dimensionality of pre-service teachers' sense of efficacy. This work contributes to an understanding of issues and problems relating to the measure of Chinese pre-service teachers' efficacy beliefs.
[Copyright © 2006 De La Salle University, Philippines.]

This paper presents evidence that contemporary teachers in Hong Kong are confronted with professional role diffusion. The phase of stabilization, which characterized many teachers with four to six years of teaching experience in Huberman’s (1989) study, seems to have deferred. In a life history study of four teachers with six to ten year teaching experiences, the absence of a stabilization phase was found in the professional life of the informants. It is argued that the quest of excellence and accountability in school education has contributed to a prolonged period of survival and discovery phase and a rapid recurrence of stabilized and destabilized cycle.