A quasi-experimental research study is reported in this paper. Its aim was to evaluate the effects of different types of pedagogy on the cultivation of students' critical thinking dispositions. One hundred and forty Secondary 4 students (i.e. tenth-grade students at 15–17 years of age) from two Hong Kong schools joined a teaching intervention in which they learnt strategies of argumentation through an established critical thinking framework (i.e. Kuhn's model The Skills of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]). Analysis revealed collaborative group work to exert positive impacts on students' development of critical thinking when used in conjunction with explicit instruction in reasoning and evidence-based justifications during the intervention. The research results also showed the students who received teacher guidance to have engaged more interactively in joint learning tasks, thereby illustrating the important role of the teacher in facilitating group discussions.
[Copyright of Thinking Skills and Creativity is the property of Pergamon Press.]

Liberal Studies was initially introduced as a non-statutory subject in Hong Kong in 1992. It then confronted intense opposition and a bumpy implementation path before securing mandatory status in the new senior secondary curriculum introduced in 2009. Recently, this core subject has been under review. Whilst it is considered to promote students' socio-political participation, the subject has also been accused of triggering antagonism towards the government. In view of these concerns, this article probes teachers' perceptions of the recent development of Liberal Studies and examines the dynamic interplay between the curriculum review and the potential political controversies surrounding the subject in post-colonial Hong Kong. Reporting the results of a study comprising questionnaire-based surveys and follow-up semi-structured interviews, it reveals that whilst teachers are worried about the proposed reduction of socio-political topics in the curriculum, they approve of incorporating additional China-related content. Furthermore, the participating teachers praised Liberal Studies for its notable impact on raising students' social consciousness, which has motivated them to learn about community affairs and fight for justice. Finally, the article also explores the study's profound implications for the further development of Liberal Studies and citizenship education in Hong Kong and beyond.
[Copyright of Oxford Review of Education is the property of Routledge.]

Although the contribution of family support and peer support to university adjustment has been examined separately, few attempts have been made to explore the mechanism underlying this relation. This is the first study in the Asian context to test the role of self-esteem in mediating the effect of social support on first-year university adjustment outcomes. Self-esteem is a measure of one's positive or negative attitudes toward oneself (Rosenberg, 1965). Higher self-esteem is vital to a variety of developmental outcomes in early adulthood, such as the transition to university, whereas lower self-esteem has been related to poorer adjustment (Hickman, Bartholomae, & McKenry, 2000). Perceived self-esteem stems from social attachments to others that reflect positively on oneself and provide interpersonal support (Friedlander, Reid, Shupak, & Cribbie, 2007). High self esteem developed as a result of social support from family and peers may increase individuals' belief in their ability to solve problems, leading to better university adjustment. The authors hypothesized that self-esteem mediates the impact of family support and peer support on university adjustment. The participants in this study were 418 first year university students (mean age 19.94 years; 65% female) at an education university in Hong Kong, China, offering mainly education related subjects. As expected, findings showed that first-year university students receiving greater family and peer support reported better adjustment outcomes overall, which provides additional evidence of the universally beneficial effects of multiple support figures on university adjustment. Such findings corroborate the previous argument that parental support plays an important role throughout adolescence and early adulthood, even as reliance on support from peers increases.
[Copyright of Journal of College Student Development is the property of The Johns Hopkins University Press.]

Teachers' self-efficacy is a critical predictor for successful inclusive physical education. However, little is known about preservice physical educators' self-efficacy toward teaching students with autism spectrum disorders in China. A sound instrument is necessary to measure their self-efficacy level. This validation study examined the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Physical Educators' Self-Efficacy Toward Including Students with Disabilities--Autism. A multisection survey form was administered to preservice physical educators in Mainland China (n = 205) and Hong Kong (n = 227). The results of confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the one-factor model of the scale in the total sample and each of the two samples. Invariance tests across the two samples supported configural and metric invariance but not scalar invariance. The scale scores showed good internal reliability and were correlated with theoretically relevant constructs (i.e., burnout and life satisfaction) in the total sample and subsamples. These findings generally support the utility of the scale for use among Chinese preservice physical educators.
[Copyright of Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly is the property of Human Kinetics, Inc..]

In recent years, many teachers suffered different kinds of negative emotions in the context of education reforms. A typical explanation was that the education reforms disempowered teachers in teaching, so teachers were forced to do much non-instructional work. Teachers considered their work meaningless but were powerless to change it, and eventually indulged themselves in negative emotions. However, the present research suggested that this explanation had neglected teacher agency and might be incomplete. Arguing from the perspective of social constructionism, the research showed that teachers in Hong Kong experienced negative emotions in education reforms because, on top of the disempowerment, the reforms structurally displaced teachers' educational goals with administrative goals. The goal displacement impeded teachers' evaluation of the instructional values of their work. Thus, teachers perceived their work as inconsistent with their major purpose of teaching (i.e. making a difference) and they felt negative towards work.
[Copyright of British Journal of Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge.]

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain's cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed.
[Copyright of History of Education is the property of Routledge.]

The current paper examined the effects of A Balanced Reading Approach for Children Always Designed to Achieve Best Results for All (ABRA), a web-based literacy programme developed by the the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) at Concordia University, on primary school children in Hong Kong. The participants were 249 Primary 1 students from two low social economic status schools in Hong Kong and the two schools were well-matched on many demographic characteristics. All participating students were pre-tested in the fall and post-tested in the following spring. After adjusting for pretest differences, the treatment school scored significantly higher than the controls on three of the six outcome measures at post-tests: phoneme-grapheme correspondence (ES = +0.22, p < 0.05), phoneme segmentation (ES = +0.46, p < 0.00), and nonsense word fluency (ES = +0.22, p < 0.06). Both treatment and control students scored similarly on word reading, listening comprehension, and initial sound fluency. The outcomes of the study provides some promising evidence of the effects of ABRA on Chinese primary students in Hong Kong, especially on the enhancement of phonological skills, thus leading to early success in the formative years of learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Practical implications are discussed.
[Copyright of Education and Information Technologies is the property of Springer New York LLC.]

Despite the growing advocacy for implementing leisure education in schools, its application lags behind its global expectations. Unlike the US trend of 'back to basics' educational philosophy which prioritizes the learning of core subjects over leisure related subjects, countries in Asia have been changing their curricula to nurture the whole person development and thus paving the way for infusing leisure education into school systems. One example is Hong Kong which has undergone a major education reform in the last two decades. Even though scholars have suggested numerous channels and strategies for leisure education in schools, a lucid framework which takes into account the views of those for which leisure education in planned was not developed. This study is to explore the underlying dimensions of leisure education as it is manifested by teachers' and students' views. A Seventeen-item questionnaire has been submitted to 105 teachers and 1187 students from seven schools geographically distributed around Hong Kong. Responses were analyzed through Smallest Space Analysis (SSA). The SSA solutions among both students and teachers have yield three-dimensional solution with coefficient of alienation .14. The solutions indicated a division to five dimensions: values and attitudes, self-development, motivation, ends and means and education among teachers and three combined dimensions among students: motivation and ends and means, self-motivation and education which includes active engagement, and values and attitudes. The identified dimensions resonate well with the suggested channels and strategies for leisure education in schools which incorporate various offerings, freedom of choice, trial and error and experiential learning. Whereas this similarity could facilitate the utilization of leisure education in schools, there is a need to consider the nature, strategy and context of such implementation. The paper addresses these challenges and draws implications for teacher training

The article discusses the author's pedagogical interaction as a U.S. trained Chinese repatriate professor with some homegrown mainland Chinese pre/in-service teachers in a Hong Kong university teacher education program. According to the author, students at the Hong Kong classroom had a nonchalant attitude to their peers' presentations which failed to accomplish the intended goal of creating an interactive learning community.
[Copyright of Issues in Teacher Education is the property of Caddo Gap Press.]

We examine school choices made by western expatriate parents in post-colonial Hong Kong in order to understand the essence of imagined global citizenship and its implications for existing ethnic and class inequalities in the education system. Responding to changes in the global job market, a small but increasingly visible group of parents are seeking to challenge what they see as the constraints of expatriate life by developing global opportunities for their children through Cantonese language acquisition in the local education system. Drawing on the sociological literature on school choice and middle-class identity, we argue that these parents are negotiating for themselves a global imaginary in which cultures can easily be traversed and social class is levelled. But such global desires, we suggest, can also replicate colonial privilege in a way that marginalises poorer schools and other ethnic minorities in the education system.
[Copyright of British Journal of Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge.]