The main objective of this paper is to explore how two different intervention programmes that were based on Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System succeeded in motivating Chinese university students to learn English by enhancing their vision of their Ideal L2 Self. One was a voluntary programme at a university in England, whereas the other was conducted within a compulsory credit-bearing English course at a university in Hong Kong. In spite of the differences between the two programmes, including the design of the interventions, the tasks employed, the length of the programmes and the types of students who participated in the study, the findings revealed that both programmes were effective in motivating the participants to learn English and increasing their linguistic self-confidence through strengthening their vision of their Ideal L2 Self, and making their goals clearer and more specific. Lessons learned from the two pioneering programmes and recommendations for future similar programmes will be discussed.
[Copyright of Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2011.614693]

Women business ownership contributes to entrepreneurship quality and diversity. However, the new venture creation rate of females lags far behind that of males. How to increase female entrepreneurship by entrepreneurship education is an important topic in the field. It has been reported that students' entrepreneurial intention is a key to their future entrepreneurial behaviors. This paper aims to empirically compare the entrepreneurial intentions between female and male engineering students with the exertion of entrepreneurship education. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was used as the theoretical basis of this study. A total of 411 engineering students from three universities in Hong Kong, 303 males and 108 females, were involved in this study. The results show that TPB is appropriate to explain entrepreneurial intention of both female and male students. Further, male and female students are different in terms of entrepreneurial attitudes, social norms and entrepreneurial intentions even they experienced entrepreneurial education. This study suggests that teaching strategies to foster entrepreneurial intention of females should (1) emphasize female entrepreneurship, 2) provide female entrepreneurial models, and (3) create an entrepreneurial culture in campus.
[Copyright of Journal of Women's Entrepreneurship and Education is the property of Institut Ekonomskih Nauka.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.ien.bg.ac.rs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=13&lang=en]

Humanities includes a diverse range of disciplines in which little literature has explored in any depth the desired learning outcomes. This study was designed to articulate and illustrate learning outcomes in the humanities from students' voices and work. Undergraduate students in their final year, postgraduate students and recent alumni from the Faculty of Arts at a Hong Kong university were interviewed individually or in groups of three to four. They discussed their desired and actual learning outcomes in three areas: the overall university experience, studying in the humanities and their studies in their specific majors. The students' comments were grouped into 16 categories of description. Seventy-three pieces of student work were collected and matched to the 16 categories to illustrate students' perceptions. A common set of qualities was found in all the humanities programs. From the data, knowledge is the most valued by humanities students, followed by rational thinking. Accomplishment and self-direction are relatively less mentioned. Further discussion is presented on how and why humanities students value different qualities, based on students voices interfaced with some relevant literature. The findings have been helpful in bringing the student voice into internal discussions about outcomes-based approaches to teaching and learning and how these approaches relate to internal quality-assurance and curriculum-change processes.
[Copyright of Higher Education Research & Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.542558 ]

Cross-cultural changes were accompanied by the sovereignty transition of Hong Kong during the TIMSS data collection, which triggered migration of intellectual families between Hong Kong and other places. To enhance comparability of the urban setting, this investigation focuses on Singapore and Hong Kong for having similar Chinese majority and colonial history. As both cities were reported having high student performance in science, student self-concept is articulated to examine its reciprocal relationship with science achievement under the context of non-monotonic population transition. The perspectives of comparative education have been gained through the cross-cultural understanding of empirical findings from the trend data analysis.
[Copyright of International Education Studies is the property of Canadian Center of Science and Education.
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This longitudinal study (2001-09) of two Hong Kong secondary schools highlights six issues with an integrated arts curriculum: first, integration of knowledge and skills negatively precedes the integration of learners' construction of meaning; second, integration is perceived as challenging the profession's status; third, teachers are unaccustomed to co-teaching; fourth, teachers have little prior experience conceptualizing cross-discipline teaching and learning; fifth, Hong Kong's current systemwide education reform places arts integration as a relatively low priority; and sixth, because integrated arts curriculum implementation is not mandatory, the vagaries of individual school management create a plethora of integration approaches that confound the task of forging a common definition. Remedial recommendations include cascading "seed projects" to broaden teachers' views of integrated arts and teaching, facilitating supportive school timetabling, and sharing integrated learning outcomes in the individual schools.
[Copyright of Arts Education Policy Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2012.687339 ]