Background and aims: The theoretical rationale of STEM education has originated from the curriculum integration theories. Numerous studies have discussed the integration of STEM education in covering the interconnected nature of the four disciplines and real-life problems. Three approaches have been widely mentioned, which included multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (Vasquez et al., 2013). Although teachers play a core role in designing and implementing STEM pedagogy at schools, little research explored mathematics teachers’ views of STEM. Hence, this exploratory study aims to explore mathematics teachers’ perceptions of STEM education to address the issue. Specifically, the study sought to describe the concerns and challenges faced by Hong Kong mathematics teachers in implementing STEM education, and to expand our understanding of implementing STEM education in mathematics teaching.Methodology or process(es) undertaken: By purposive sampling, nine Hong Kong mathematics teachers (4 primary, 5 secondary) were invited into online interviews. Interviewees were selected based on the criteria that they had taught mathematics in schools and had participated in STEM education. Their teaching experience ranged from 5 to 15 years. They were asked to report their views on the goals and values of STEM education, the approaches of STEM integration, challenges they faced, and its relationship to mathematics.Results and conclusions: It is found that two values of STEM education are recognized by Hong Kong mathematics teachers, which include promoting students' personal development and social technological innovation. Three integration approaches of STEM pedagogy (multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary) are identified. The transdisciplinary approach is most preferred, but the interdisciplinary approach is most adopted. Teachers perceives both internal and external challenges when implementing STEM at schools. The external challenges are related

近些年來，作為一種整合課程的STEM教育在全球各地蓬勃發展。如何將學校常規教學跟STEM學習有效地融合起來，是推行STEM教育需要面對的問題。我國香港地區的小學數學課堂教學在探索實踐中，基於數學課題設計相關的STEM教學活動，在協助學生理解數學學科知識的同時，促進他們跨學科、跨領域知識的學習和應用。 Copyright © 2022 江西教育出版社有限責任公司.

This study aims to advance our understanding of the role of word knowledge in second language (L2) reading comprehension by exploring whether morphological awareness and vocabulary assessed one year ago contribute to decoding and listening comprehension which in turn contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese children learning English as an L2. A total of 167 Grade 3 and 4 primary school students (Mage = 8.99 years) in Hong Kong were tested on English morphological awareness and vocabulary at Time 1, and they were also tested on English decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension at Time 2, one year later. Our regression models showed that word knowledge tested at Time 1 was a significant predictor of decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension at Time 2; and word knowledge explained more variance in decoding, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension in children who had higher levels of word knowledge. The results of structural equation modeling indicated that vocabulary contributed to reading comprehension fully through decoding and listening comprehension. Morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension partially through vocabulary and decoding, and it also had a unique direct contribution to reading comprehension. The findings from this study suggested the importance of emphasizing word knowledge in developing children’s reading comprehension in an L2 at an early stage of learning to read. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

The first COVID-19 case in Hong Kong was detected on January 22, 2020. The disease spread quickly. Schools were suspended from January 25 to May 24. During these four months, the Government promoted online learning to replace face-to-face learning. However, as online teaching was very new, school music teachers had found tremendous difficulties, especially in recorder playing and ensemble training.On the other hand, the Hong Kong Diploma for Secondary Education Examination was postponed from March 11 to April 24 in the same year. New measurements for disease prevention were implemented. For example, Paper-II Performing was cancelled as it involved ensemble playing, which was not in line with the Government’s disease prevention policy. In this study, I have invited two primary school music teachers and two secondary music teachers to share the challenges and opportunities they have faced in teaching during the pandemic. Copyright © 2022 International Society for Music Education.

This study draws on the findings from a STEM education project to examine Hong Kong in-service primary school teachers’ perceived challenges in implementing STEM education, the support they received in STEM teacher professional development (STEM TPD), and their needs for future STEM TPD. The study engaged teacher professional development through a school-university partnership and adopted a practitioner research approach that aimed at enhancing primary school teachers’ professional capacity of designing STEM activities relevant to the Hong Kong curriculum, with an emphasis on the learning of crosscutting concepts and inquiry-based teaching. STEM TPD is aimed at collaborative curriculum development as an opportunity to foster active learning through co-creating curriculum materials among teachers and university facilitators. Twelve primary school teachers from various subject teaching backgrounds were interviewed. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to collect the teachers’ experiences with the STEM TPD and their views on the integration of cross-cutting concepts in designing STEM lessons. Findings of the study revealed teachers' perceived challenges during the preparation and teaching phases related to STEM instruction and lesson planning, limited resources, and other concerns embedded in broader contextual situations. While teachers reported to have received different types of support from the STEM TPD relating to the pedagogical knowledge of STEM, future directions for STEM TPD were expressed in relation to content components of STEM TPD, opportunities for authentic learning and first-hand experiences, and coherence. Finally, this chapter discusses areas that need to be resolved before a further enhancement in terms of quality and quantity of STEM lessons could be expected. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Trees are living organisms that are subject to attack by decay or disease-causing natural enemies as well as weather adversities and long-term climate change in the course of their life span. When they suffer from these intrusions or extensive damage by typhoons, they often express visible symptoms, which may be structural or physiological. Initiated by a group of scholars at The Education University of Hong Kong, with the involvement of student-teachers as well as teachers and students in primary and secondary schools, a project, “Life Education and Citizen Science through Tree Protection and Conservation”, was launched with the objectives of caring, respecting and acting for our nature from preserving trees and enhancing citizens’ contribution to protecting the environment. The initial project experiences revealed that students acquired knowledge and skills in tree assessment and also cultivated positive attitudes towards tree conservation, which are relevant to the balanced development of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes in this new century. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kerry J. Kennedy, Margarita Pavlova and John Chi-Kin Lee; individual chapters, the contributors.

In many disciplines of STEM education, online experiments (OEs), commonly called remote-controlled experiments, become an emerging practice in technology-enhanced learning because of their many merits perceived in educational research. We recently formulated an innovative, low-cost, and open-source approach to developing new OEs rapidly. It won a gold medal and a special prize in an international innovation and invention competition in 2018. Using this new approach, teachers and students can easily access OEs with a lightweight web browser using any hardware and any operating system without installing additional software or apps. They can observe and/or control the experiments and collect authentic data (over a very short or long time) for further analysis by plotting graphs and/or conducting calculations to obtain important results. Some well-accepted instructional approaches or pedagogies have been integrated into online science/STEM experiments, which can also be aligned with school-based curricula to provide self-contained courseware for students’ online self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we will focus on whether OEs could really and effectively provide the essential elements of experimental learning to ‘school students’ as expected in traditional laboratory work. From our pilot implementation in four Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland China (CHINA) secondary schools with a total of 172 participants, we explored the OE experiences of different experiments and cognitive performance among students from different regions and genders using the conventional mixed methods research and design-based research. Students’ feedback and suggestions for improvement of the OEs were also analysed together with some specific implications for science/STEM education. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Life education, originating in the West, has been an increasingly important source of moral and values education in the Greater China region. Life education, to some extent, is linked with different kinds of values education that encompasses moral and citizenship education, environmental education as well as religious and spiritual education. In the 21st century, life education could also be complementary to positive education that is related to the development of positive (life) values and the pursuit of well-being. Life education also echoes with health education under the impact of COVID-19 along with life and planning education including life-long learning perspectives. This chapter explores the theoretical and practical connections between life education, positive education and other values education and proposes an integrated and holistic approach to curriculum development for the context of Hong Kong. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kerry J. Kennedy, Margarita Pavlova and John Chi-Kin Lee; individual chapters, the contributors.

系統功能語言學認為語言具有其系統和功能，語文教學應該使學生掌握語言的系統，並在互動中學習如何恰當地使用語言。本文通過實證研究分析59位香港非華語學生的真實語料，結合量化數據和質性分析，探討第二語言學習者的實用中文寫作表現。研究發現，非華語學生整體實用文寫作能力較弱，尤其在語旨、語式、連接、文法等層面表現最弱；在語境內容方面普遍文類知識不足，無法掌握特定文類的寫作目的和結構，文步和層次不完整，亦缺少語境的概念；在表述方式層面詞匯量有限；在文法呈現方面受到英文文法影響，體現了語言的負遷移現象。本研究亦通過基於系統功能語言學發展出的寫作評估標準，為寫作評量提供新的視角，使教師和研究者能更細緻地了解非華語學生的寫作難點和學習需求，掌握學生到底是在語境內容、表述方式或文法呈現當中的十四個層面有甚麼不足之處，才能進一步發展有針對性的教學設計，通過相應策略提升第二語言學習者的寫作能力。Systemic functional linguistics emphasizes on the system and functions of language, and it suggests that language education should help students learn the system of language and how to apply it in communication appropriately. This empirical research analyzed the authentic materials of 59 non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The research findings discovered the weak performance of NCS students in practical writing, especially in the aspects of tenor, mode, conjunction, and grammar. Other problems included the insufficiency in the genre knowledge, inability to understand the writing purpose and structure of certain genre, incomplete steps and phases, lack of the concept of context, limited vocabulary, and the language form affected by English grammar as the result of negative transfer in second language. This research not only studied their practical writing performance but also introduced a new scoring scheme of Chinese writing developed based on systemic functional linguistics. Therefore, teachers and researchers can understand students' writing difficulties and learning needs from the perspectives of context, discourse, grammar and presentation, and develop specific teaching design or relevant strategies to improve the writing ability of second language learners. Copyright © 2021 香港中文大學香港教育研究所.