This study draws upon an ecological perspective to examine parental involvement in homework and its relationship with primary school children's educational outcomes within the Chinese sociocultural context of Hong Kong. Data were collected using homework diaries and questionnaires administered to 1,309 pairs of students and parents spanning all six primary grade levels in 36 primary schools in Hong Kong. Results show that primary children across grade levels devote a substantial amount of time each day after school to homework assignments and revision, while parents' involvement in the homework process varies. Such variation in parental involvement is found to relate to the child's grade level as well as the parent's educational attainment. Gain in children's academic efficacy with higher parental involvement level is observed among junior primary students as well as those with parents of lower educational attainment. Implications for the school's role in involving parents in the homework process are discussed.
[Copyright of School Community Journal is the property of Academic Development Institute.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.adi.org/journal/]

In this paper, I posit a hybrid conceptualisation of women teachers' identities in the globalising and localising negotiation of gender. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridities, this paper argues for a fluid, hybrid and multifaceted reality of women teachers' lives in the areas of family, the husband and wife relationship, and the place of the child in the family as they engage in workplaces. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese women primary school teachers first individually and then in groups of four or five in Hong Kong where globalisation meets with the indigenous Chinese culture. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Gender & Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540250802581834]

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge were uniquely associated with all three concurrently measured literacy skills, as well as longitudinal measures of specific literacy skills. Naming speed was also uniquely associated with concurrent word reading, as well as all three literacy skills longitudinally, even with their autoregressive effects controlled. Analyses of children's spelling mistakes indicated that 97% and 95% of all errors were either morpholexically or orthographically based at times 1 and 2, respectively. Morphologically based spelling errors were also uniquely associated with all three literacy skills across time. Findings underscore the importance of morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese literacy acquisition.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888430903162910]

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine parenting style in the domain of emotion socialization through studying the relationships among parenting styles, emotion-related parental practices, and parental goals of Hong Kong-Chinese mothers. Data were collected from 189 Hong Kong-Chinese mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children. Hong Kong-Chinese mothers reported that among authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting styles, they adopted an authoritative style most often and an authoritarian style least often. They valued both relational and individualistic emotional competence of their children as parental goals but regarded the former as more important than the latter. Structural equation modeling results indicated that parental goals mediated the influences of parenting styles on parental practices. Authoritative mothers who held individualistic emotional competence goals adopted different parental practices (a coaching or an emotion-encouraging approach) from those who held relational emotional competence goals. When mothers adopted authoritarian parenting and endorsed relational emotional competence as a parental goal, they responded to children's expression of emotions in a dismissing way.
Practice or Policy: Parenting styles play an overarching role in emotion socialization, influencing both parental practices and goals. The results imply that school personnel, counselors, or social workers should take into account parenting styles, parental goals, and cultural values of participants when they offer training programs to parents.
[Copyright of Early Education & Development is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10409280802541973]

Learning strategies and affective factors could have a profound impact on student standardized mathematics performance. This study investigated gender differences in affective factors, learning strategies, and preferred learning situations, and how these variables affect math achievement of 15 year olds in the United States and Hong Kong on the PISA 2003 assessment. Math self-efficacy was found to be the best predictor of math performance in both countries. A striking mismatch was identified between Hong Kong students' superior math performance and extremely low math self-concept and between U.S. students' high confidence and weak performance. In addition, U.S. students' interest in math was significantly negatively related to their math performance. Contrary to a widely reported finding that East Asian students emphasize memorization, U.S. students were found to heavily rely on memorization strategies, which was also a negative predictor of math achievement.
[Copyright of International Journal of Testing is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15305050903106875]

Gender differences in creativity scores of the Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests were found for a sample of 2476 4th- to 9th-graders from 8 primary schools and 4 secondary schools in Hong Kong. Specifically, girls in the junior high grades excelled boys in verbal flexibility, figural fluency, figural flexibility, figural uniqueness, and figural unusualness. These findings contrasted with previous findings of no gender differences in a norming study of the same instrument carried out eight years before this study. The gender differences were explained in terms of environmental effect and cultural effect.
[Copyright of Creativity Research Journal is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2010.481522]

Vygotsky speculated that parents play an important role in the intellectual development of their children, and that this role includes the transfer of expectations related to their children's academic achievement. Consequently, different parents can produce different contexts of academic achievement for their children. The participants were 215 Primary 5 and 6 students from four primary schools in Hong Kong, and their parents. Students were administered a test of working memory and their academic achievement was indicated by their schoolassessed mathematics and language achievement scores. Parents reported their expectations of their children's academic achievement, the extent of their home and school involvement, and their educational and income levels. Correlational and sequential regression analyses showed that different schools yielded different contexts of academic achievement. The results support the hypothesis that parents, and especially parental expectations, play an important role in children's academic achievement, and that within Hong Kong different schools can be characterised by different contexts of achievement.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410903059024]

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among parental goals, parental beliefs and parenting styles. Questionnaires were completed during interviews with 189 Hong Kong-Chinese mothers of children aged six to eight years. Results indicated that these mothers embraced Chinese parental beliefs (guan) and Chinese parental goals of filial piety and harmonious social relationships. In contrast to other studies on Chinese parenting, this study examined Chinese mothers' adoption of psychological control in addition to authoritarian and authoritative parenting. Participants' main styles were found to be authoritative and psychologically controlling rather than authoritarian as reported in previous research. Parental goals were found to mediate the effect of parental beliefs on adoption of parenting styles. Mothers who embraced guan and filial piety reported either an authoritarian or a psychologically controlling parenting style, while those who embraced guan and harmonious social relationships adopted an authoritative parenting style.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430701536525]

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism.
[Copyright of International Journal of Multilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/ijm068.0]