Teachers’ attitudes towards curriculum change are crucial in determining the success of implementation. This study examined the relationships between kindergarten teachers’ perceptions of instructional leadership, efficacy, trust in colleagues and behavioral intentions to implement play-based learning in Hong Kong. Data were collected from 542 Hong Kong kindergarten teachers who participated in a survey. The results showed that instructional leadership was positively association with teachers’ behavioral intentions to implement play-based learning directly and indirectly through teacher efficacy and trust in colleagues. The findings affirm that principals and curriculum leaders played a key role in cultivating a supportive leadership which helped form teachers’ positive attitudes towards curriculum reform. Moreover, enhancing trust in colleagues could develop teachers’ efficacy beliefs for practicing play-based learning. Copyright © 2020 All Academic, Inc.

Students with SEBD bring a major challenge to the success of inclusive education. Positive relationships between teachers and students have been found to be a factor vital to the development of students with SEBD. A study reported that students with severe SEBD perceived the teacher student (t-s) relationship in residential schools as better than that in mainstream schools. In Hong Kong, students with SEBD may either study in mainstream schools, or special schools. Some special schools provide residential services. In Thailand, parents can only choose mainstream schools (either public or private) for their children with SEBD. From a qualitative approach, a study was conducted in two Hong Kong special schools (one primary and one secondary) and one private school (with both primary and secondary sections) in Thailand to explore teachers’ perception of the t-s relationship among students with SEBD. The three schools offer residential services. Information was collected mainly from individual interviews with 21 teachers from these three schools. Themes emerging from the analysis reflect that the cultural concerns about the difference between “relationship” and “guanxi” require further elaboration and discussion. Copyright © 2019 ICTEL.

The Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) is a teacher responsible for the implementation of policies relating to the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) at various levels of schooling in the mainstream setting. The UK has taken the leading role in SEN coordination since the early 1990s (DFE, 1994). Before 1994, there was no formal requirement for schools to appoint such a teacher. However, the 1994 Code (DFE, 1994) placed a statutory obligation on all schools to identify a specialist teacher to coordinate provision for pupils with SEN, and it described the roles and responsibilities of the SENCO. In the UK, a dominant theme in SENCO research in the past decade has been the extent to which the role is concerned with aspects of leadership and management (e.g., Cole, 2005; Layton, 2005; Rosen-Webb, 2011; Tissot, 2013). The role of SENCOs have been debated in the literature (Norwich, 2010; Oldham & Radford, 2011), specifically concerning whether it should be a specialist role or a more generic management role. An individual's interpretation and enactment of the role of SENCO – as specialist or management, or somewhere in between – depends on the individual (Kearns, 2005) and school-level factors (Blandford, 2013). While the UK schools are exploring effective ways for assuring the effective functioning of SENCOs, Hong Kong followed the footstep of the UK by introducing a similar position in 2015. Through a pilot scheme in 2015, a total of 124 schools, including 65 secondary schools and 59 primary schools, were included. The final evaluation report of the pilot scheme concluded that although there was variation in the roles of SENCOs in different schools, it was clear that they were engaging in more strategic activity as the new role develops (Education Bureau, 2018). In addition, two studies (Poon-McBrayer & Wong, 2013; Poon-McBrayer, 2017) investigating the roles of principal leadership on HK schools' inclusive education reforms found that

Self-regulated learning (SRL), defined as a capacity for autonomy and control exhibited by individuals who direct, monitor, and regulate actions towards certain learning goals (Paris & Paris, 2001), has received much research attention over the past four decades (Panadero, 2017). Students’ SRL capacity can be developed in various settings (Kim, 2015) and this paper will report on how a group of primary school students who are from families with a low socioeconomic background have enhanced their SRL capacity through participating in an after-school tutoring program provided by university students. Key influential factors, in the design and delivery of the program, are identified. The study collected data in a youth community center in Hong Kong. The center has provided tutoring service for school students over years. The center has a need to improve their service for students who attend their after-school programmes. The intervention was designed according to Zimmerman's (2000)three phases model. Both implicit and explicit teaching of SRL strategies were incorporated. 18 university students, serving tutors received training before the beginning of the intervention. Twenty three primary school students participated in the programme, completed pre-post questionnaires on self-regulated learning capacity, and attended interviews at the end of each of eight sessions throughout the programme. As the data analysis is on going, more details about the findings will be reported in the conference, if the paper is accepted. Copyright © 2019 ECLL.

Creativity and epistemic beliefs are important topics in both psychological and educational research. Despite the long history of research on each of these intrinsically related topics, little work has been done to connect the theories about them. Inspired by the 4C theory of creativity, this study investigated the effects of epistemic beliefs on creativity and the mediation of intellectual risk-taking. The subjects were 659 undergraduates in a university in Hong Kong. The findings revealed that (i) intellectual risk-taking was a strong and positive predictor of creativity; (ii) the certainty dimension of epistemic beliefs was a negative and significant predictor of both intellectual risk-taking and creativity, whereas the complexity dimension was a positive and significant predictor of both; (iii) the source dimension had an indirect positive impact on creativity mediated by intellectual risk-taking; and (iv) the justification dimension had a direct positive impact on creativity. By synthesising the conclusions from this study and the theory of epistemic development, a two-way model was generated to illustrate the undergraduates’ epistemic beliefs and their relationships with creativity. The findings of this study indicated that a dialectical belief of knowledge as human creation might be the most beneficial for undergraduates to develop their creativity. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

While the short form of career development self-efficacy inventory (SF-CDSEI) has been validated in students with and without special educational needs, the relationships between the five subscales (i.e., Career goal setting, Career planning, vocational training selection, Job hunting preparation and Job hunting) have not yet been adequately explored to inform more effective practices (e.g., intervention development). Based on the Social cognitive career theory (SCCT), this study examined their relationships based on two SCCT-supported models with a new sample of secondary students with SEN(n=218). In model 1, student self-efficacy of career planning (CP) and career goal setting (CGS) were two cognitive-oriented predictors of a general action-oriented self-efficacy factor consisting of job-hunting preparation (JHP), vocational training selection (VTS) and job-hunting behavior (JHB). In model 2, JHP and VTS formed a general factor of job-hunting preparation (G-JHP), while JHB was separated. The results of model 1 showed 95% variance of action-oriented CDSEI could be explained by cognitive-oriented self-efficacy of CP and CGS with CGS was a stronger predictor (β=.60 vs. β=.43). Comparatively, model 2 showed that 90% variance of G-JHP and 87% JHB could be explained by career planning and career goal setting. But as compared to CGS(β=.42), CP (β=.57) was a stronger predictor of JHB. For G-JHP, CGS was a stronger predictor (β=.68) as compared to CP (β=.32). The results are discussed in relation to the SCCT to develop intervention programs for addressing the needs of SEN students in terms of CDSEI. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

This project aims at promoting the idea and implementation of digital citizenship education to Hong Kong schools and supporting in-serve teachers in professional development. Twenty teacher participants from seven local secondary schools joined the project and attended our 6-sessions (9 hours) of professional development training workshops in the academic year of 2019/2020. The training workshops delivered digital citizenship education framework and related concepts and teaching methods to the teachers, including digital citizenship, media literacy, digital commerce, digital footprint, digital etiquette, and cyberbullying. Our team also supported teachers to design their school-based digital citizenship curriculum for trial teaching and discussion of feasible pedagogies after the training workshops. After conducting quantitative data analysis before and after the training workshops, the result found that over 90% of teachers are satisfied with the training workshops. Moreover, there was a significant statistical difference in their teaching of digital citizenship on digital law, digital commerce, and digital security and safety dimensions between pre and posttest. They are more willing to teach these topics after the training. Facing the challenges caused by COVID19 in 2020, however, all Hong Kong schools were forced to close down. Therefore, our class observation has been delayed but we still found that teachers can utilize different online learning activities to implement digital citizenship education, though some teachers also reported that they were not confident to teach certain aspects such as legal dimension. This project suggests a need of equipping teachers’ understanding and teaching of digital citizenship education, and revisiting the relevant curriculum. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

This presentation will report a study for enhancing pre-service teachers' metacognitive teaching competencies through a tripartite school partnership model with a view to tackling the impacts and challenges created by the Learning to Learn 2.0+ curriculum. Since the introduction of the Learning to Learn 2.0+ curriculum document in Hong Kong, metacognitive teaching has come to the forefront as an innovative research agenda in teacher education. The key concept underpinning Learning to Learn 2.0+ is that of teachers developing students' generic skills including decision making, planning, and problem solving. All these skills can be conceptualized as metacognitive skills. A metacognitive teaching framework includes thinking aloud, refining learning strategy use, letting strategy use gel, and self-assessing and setting goals were adopted as the theoretical framework of the study. The pre-service teachers of this study were equipped with such metacognitive teaching strategies and skills through lesson implementation in the partnership schools. Pre-post tests were conducted to examine the enhancement of the metacognitive teaching abilities of pre-service teachers. Results of the study show that providing an authentic environment and consultative support to the pre-service teachers can help them to master metacognitive teaching skills effectively. A training guide for metacognitive teaching were developed for pre-service teachers and applied in teacher education programme. A tripartite school partnership model consists of course instructors, teachers from partnership schools and our pre-service teacher were developed to provide an authentic learning environment to enhance the metacognitive teaching competence of our pre-service teachers. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

The examination-oriented education, de-emphasis of hands-on practical work in science lessons and the lack of interdisciplinary curricula are some of the major constraints or obstacles for STEM education in China as reflected from their deficiency or ineffectiveness in nurturing gifted students or talents. In this presentation, we will report two different innovative ways to employ technology and field-based learning for effective STEM education as based on our prize-winning educational device (called mobile logger for science and environmental studies with a corresponding software/app called SESlogger). In the first case, a cartoon video was specifically developed for teaching the primary school students on how to use the device and then students were arranged to practice it for field-based learning in a Guangdong school campus. In the second case, the mobile logger was used to collect on-site environmental data for hiking through all the ten sections of the MacLehose Trail with a total distance of 100km and then the best section of the Trail was designed as a kind of technology-enhanced field trip for trial run by some university students in Hong Kong. To evaluate the educational effectiveness, students' attitudes and views towards the STEM lessons and activities have been collected using questionnaire survey (together with the pre-test and post-test scores on the students' cognitive understanding and level of practical performance) or interviews. For these two cases, we will also present the findings on students' learning difficulties and field-based implementation problems or issues together with reflections from the researchers themselves. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.

In Hong Kong, STEM education has become timely only since 2016 when the government launched the related policy initiatives which impacted the education practices substantially. Particularly, learning in STEM domains has often consisted of memorization of facts devoid of deep connection, separated from life and often failing to integrate the STEM disciplines. Hence, STEM learning is urged to take place in an environment with more attention to different modes of communicating and meaning making. Individuals are required to make meaning and find ways to create personal connections to deeply internalize this knowledge. The investigations, sense-making, creativity, representation and communication of STEM-related ideas are all conducted and connected with human implications of meaningfulness. In this connection, this paper will report the study based on constructivist narrative approach (as cross-case studies) of 3 pre-service teachers majoring in STEM-based programme at teacher training institutes in Hong Kong and 3 in-service STEM teachers. The empirical study will purpose to address three research questions within STEM professional teacher identity perspective: (1) What STEM teacher should be look like and mean to them? (2) What are the factors which construct the STEM teacher identity? (3) What are the needs for professional training of STEM teachers and implications for teacher education? Empirical findings from this study will inform the implications on the context of STEM teacher identity, career and life planning education with STEM-related career aspirations and the professionalism growth of STEM teacher in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.