Educational researchers, policymakers, and administrators agree that providing in-service teachers with high-quality professional development (PD) opportunities is essential to educational success. Despite the substantial sums invested in teacher PD by countries and jurisdictions, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious challenges to teacher learning around the world. As conventional face-to-face initiatives became impracticable (e.g., workshops, conferences, school-based PD) and the need to prioritize pandemic-specific topics intensified (e.g., emergency remote teaching), teacher PD was recast both formally (where and how teachers engaged in PD) and substantively (what teachers sought to learn from PD). Amidst the international upheavals caused by COVID-19, how have teacher PD infrastructures (policies, practices, theories) responded? For this Special Issue, we put this and other questions before a panel of PD scholars in six contexts: United States, Scotland (United Kingdom), Uruguay, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong (SAR China). In their respective contributions, authors discuss issues such as the limitations of PD systems based on compliance and external accountability mechanisms, the need to center teacher motivation in existing PD frameworks, matters of access and equity, the importance of developing technological infrastructures for online and hybrid learning, problems of online safety and wellbeing, and more. The Special Issue shows that the uncertainty of today’s times requires new, global perspectives on PD design, implementation, evaluation, theory, and scholarship. To nurture agentic, highly motivated, and effective teachers for the pandemic era and beyond, countries and jurisdictions should think more creatively about how to best support teacher learning. Copyright © 2022 International Journal for Research in Education.

The ability to formulate problems is an important part of computational thinking (CT) development for nurturing creative problem solvers. However, problem formulation is inadequately addressed in primary school education. This study aimed to investigate the problem formulation processes of primary school students. Students from eight winning teams in a primary school CT competition in Hong Kong participated in the study. Focus group interviews were conducted with the students and teachers separately. Data analysis revealed that the students’ problem formulation processes could be divided into three stages, namely, the Find, Investigate, and Define stages. The Investigate stage was an essential stage connecting the Find and Define stages. Interviews showed that support from teachers and parents was necessary for students to gain a positive experience of formulating problems in primary school context. Findings suggest that CT curriculum should be designed to allocate sufficient project time and learning space for students to develop their problem formulation ability. Problem formulation abilities are critical in the development of students’ creativity in computational thinking. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This study investigates the effects of student use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies on their computer programming achievement. Ninety-six students from undergraduate teacher training programmes offered by a Hong Kong university voluntarily participated in the study. Sixty-six of them were first-year students enrolling on an introductory Java programming course, while 30 were second-year students enrolling on an advanced Java programming course. The SRL strategies adopted by participants were measured by the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and were exemplified from the reflective writing of their electronic portfolios. Their achievement in computer programming was evaluated using continuous and end of course assessments. The findings of this study suggest that higher-order cognitive strategies (i.e. elaboration, organization, critical thinking), metacognitive control strategies (i.e. self-regulation) and resource management strategies (i.e. time and study environment management, help seeking) are likely to facilitate a prolonged achievement of computer programming for both novices and non-novices. They can provide insights into designing adequate SRL strategy training to support student learning in computer programming. Copyright © 2021 SCHOLINK INC.

This demo/poster will report a web-based assessment database funded by a Teaching Development Grant given to the present researcher, who designed and maintained the database and made it freely-accessible to students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers. The purpose of the database is to improve preservice teachers’ language assessment literacy and enhance their skills to design assessment instruments with sufficient quality and variety. The database stores selected language assessment tasks innovated by cohorts of postgraduate and undergraduate TESL students enrolled in the language assessment courses taught by the present researcher in a university in Hong Kong. During the demo/poster, I will present the theoretical framework underlying the design and organization of the database, how the database is integrated into the assessment literacy courses given to pre-service teachers, and an analysis of students’ reflections on their experience of using the database to learn to adapt, design and evaluate assessment tasks, as well as to validate teacher-designed language tests. At the end, I will discuss the project’s implications for language assessment literacy education of pre-service teachers and potential areas of AL research. Copyright © 2020 LTRC.

This chapter, from a student’s perspective, reports on a descriptive and exploratory analysis of a Hong Kong (HK) undergraduate’s transformative growth through her 4-year residential experience in the United Kingdom, Canada and HK respectively, using the “Attitude-Skills-Knowledge (ASK)” educational model which proposes that a person’s ability is the synergy among the three domains. The chapter will first highlight the undergraduate’s use of the ASK model in decomposing her experience into three learning categories. Then, it will include her personal reflection on how her learning synergistically equips her with transferable learning outcomes. In conclusion, plans for how stakeholders at different levels can help promote the ASK model to facilitate student residents’ growth will be presented. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

There has been an increasing attention to integration of project-based learning into Asian school curricula. And the notion of learning community is a heated topic for learning to learn in knowledge-based societies. Yet the cognitive research on using web-based learning community for project-based learning is still under-developed in Asian contexts Based on literature review, some directions in collaborative learning strategies are suggested in web-based learning community or ecology. Through a scrutiny of basic functional tools of a web-based collaborative learning platform called Knowledge Community (KC), the paper endeavors to highlight the significance of four senses of scaffolding supports (in Vygotskian terminology) for knowledge co-construction and pedagogical facilitation in groups of primary and secondary (Grade 1-12) students in Hong Kong and Singapore. Copyright © 2004 全球華人計算機教育應用學會.

Esports have grown to become a core part of popular culture in many countries, including Hong Kong. Albeit the low participation rates in Esports in Hong Kong, it was starting to gain traction, yet the local Esports advocates were experiencing challenges in promoting and popularizing the Esport. Hence, the current study was aimed to identify and reveal the determinants of participating in Esports, as well as strengthen the work on Esports behaviors using the theory of planned behavior (TPB), a reliable and valid prominent theory in predicting human behavior across a plethora of contexts, ranging from health-related behaviors to sport consumption behaviors. In the current study, the convenience sampling method was used to recruit over 2000 students (secondary school, N = 1567 (female = 615); university students, N = 1525 (female = 255). The students were invited to participate in the survey for collecting their perception on Esports participation using TPB-based questionnaire. Results were analyzed using theoretical analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that both secondary school and university students have positive attitudes toward Esports. The outcomes indicated that participating in Esports develops social networks, and people with professional Esports’ skills capability and being fortitude tend to be models of Esports participation. However, inadequate resources are a significant barrier to participation in the Esports business. The SEM model verified that the variables of intention in Esports participation among the students in Hong Kong with an adequate goodness of fit index. As a whole, the current study has identified the factors and determinants of Esports’ intention and behavior among Hong Kong students, which were successfully displayed in terms of the theory of planned behavior. In addition, the findings are expected to provide the Hong Kong government with a documented framework to advocate Esports-related policies on a long-term

Synchronous online teaching through video-conferencing software (VCS) has become a common mode of instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. This mode brings unique challenges for teachers that require specific professional digital competences. One such challenge is conducting formative assessment. Through the use of in-depth interviews with nine Hong Kong university teachers who had taught synchronously online for one semester, this exploratory study explored the challenges of conducting formative assessment during synchronous online lessons and the strategies teachers deploy to conduct formative assessment. The findings indicate that the key difficulties include gathering information on students’ needs, checking students’ understanding, giving individual feedback, and building relationships with students. To address these challenges, the teachers suggested four pedagogical strategies: (1) Combine synchronous with asynchronous approaches; (2) Utilise breakout rooms; (3) Utilise poll functions of the VCS and combine it with other online platforms; and (4) Provide time before or after lessons for informal conversations. The findings suggest that teachers need to develop specific pedagogical strategies to conduct formative assessment. This provides an initial conceptualisation of one important dimension of Professional Digital Competence, teaching using digital technologies, and one aspect of that dimension, how teachers use digital tools and strategies to conduct formative assessment. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.