This study explores the changes in the conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986'0) of student teachers during training. The focus of geographical education in Hong Kong is shifting from imparting knowledge to developing skills of geographical enquiry, requiring geography teachers to rethink their pedagogical content knowledge to reflect this change of emphasis. This poses a particular problem for student teachers with limited understanding of what is involved. In the transition from training to full time teaching, geography student teachers undergo and must undergo changes in their individual understanding about planning and conducting lessons.
The aims of this study were: (I) to explore the pattern and variations of student teachers' conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge for teaching secondary school geography; (2) to identify the factors influencing thinking and changes in conceptions; and (3) to develop a schema to synthesise the development of their geographical pedagogical content knowledge. A qualitative-interpretive research approach, adopting a phenomenographic perspective, was used. The data came from recursive, in-depth interviews with three student teachers conducted at various points during the two years of their training.
The study demonstrated that the conceptions of the student teachers shifted in varying ways and to varying degrees during training, as their pedagogical content knowledge grew. Conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge were viewed in terms of teachers' use of concepts to explain phenomena, their choice of teaching methods in relation to pupils and images of teaching. The three teachers exhibited seven conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge, ranging from the simple transmission of text to the development of structured ideas appropriate to pupil understanding, and the integration of content and method. Their conceptions were influenced by a number of factors, including their own past learning,

The study of Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition has long been an established research area. However, researchers have often worked in separate areas, for example, motivation, anxiety and learning strategies. Their studies have enriched our knowledge of the mechanisms in shaping Individual Differences, yet, very little is known about their developmental nature. In another area of Second Language Acquisition research, studies focusing mainly on learners in target-language communities, indicate that learners voice their individual differences through the construction of second language identities. These studies primarily focused on adult language learners in target language communities and yet little is known about pre-tertiary level learners studying a second language in the regions in which they have grown up.
This study was designed to explore the development of individual differences of Hong Kong English learners. Adopting a qualitative research method, ten learners from age 8 to 18 (5 females and 5 males) were interviewed three times over a two-year period. The interviews were scheduled to match the learners' transitions across key learning stages, for instance, from primary to secondary school, and from secondary school to tertiary institution. The data were analyzed in a two-tier system: narrative analysis and the analysis of narrative. The findings were presented through the ten language learners’ stories and a thematic analysis on domains of learning: home, school and out-of-class.
Findings show that Hong Kong English learners emphasized different realms of learning during different stages of their learning. Second, as learners matured, their communities of comparative others expanded and their conceptualizations of being different from their comparative others were refined. Third, the learners processed their learning experiences into future language learning orientation. Finally, participants developed their individual differences

The present study attempted to address the paucity of developmental data on English reading and spelling development among Chinese English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. English reading and spelling development among Chinese ESL learners in Hong Kong was examined in a one-year longitudinal study covering three developmental periods: Kindergarten to Grade 1, Grade 2 to Grade 3, and Grade 4 to Grade 5. One hundred and fifty five participants were tested on three types of cognitive-linguistic measures (rapid naming, phonological processing, and visual-orthographic processing) and language proficiency measures (English reading, English spelling and Chinese reading). Three major patterns of results were identified. First, the relationships between cognitive-linguistic skills and English proficiency measures differed among Chinese ESL learners of different proficiency levels. Previous research examining the significance of visual-orthographic and phonological skills to English reading and spelling development among Hong Kong Chinese ESL learners has yielded inconsistent results. On one hand, findings in some studies among kindergarteners and Grade 1 students demonstrated the predominant role of phonological skills to English reading and spelling development (Chow, McBride-Chang, & Burgess, 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). On the other hand, the study by Leong, Tan, Cheng and Hau (2005) among Grade 4 – 6 students showed that visual-orthographic skills were of greater significance than phonological skills in predicting English proficiency. Since the participants in these studies were from different age groups, differences in results may simply reflect differences in age or ‘stages’ of reading and spelling development among the participants. Findings in the present study did confirm this speculation: phonological skills were of particular importance to English reading and spelling development among younger participants while the significance

In this rapidly changing health care environment, practitioners and educators need to be flexible thinkers and skilled in clinical reasoning. They need to develop divergent approaches to solutions to complex, ill structured problems. Ill-structured problems in health care are problems that are not clearly delineated in that the nature of the problem, intermediate steps and goals are often unknown at the referral and initial interview stages of intervention. The clinical reasoning used to understand and solve this type of problems requires more than just guessing, ignoring, appealing to authority, or using rote protocols (Facione & Facione, 1996). Students need to develop these skills of reasoning, establish the connection between theory and practice, and apply these skills in client intervention. My interest in the development of clinical reasoning and reflective practice grew out of a particular concern for discovering how we can facilitate students to develop these skills beyond the technical rational approach that has been adopted in the past. Thus the purpose of this qualitative research is to explore the clinical reasoning and thinking of occupational therapists and students in Hong Kong within the context of the local culture. I used an action research approach informed by grounded theory. This involved a dynamic interaction between my research, teaching, and reflection in constructing and generating propositions, thus I incorporate insights about clinical reasoning development into my teaching and my teaching informs my research development. I incorporate the literature to substantiate and expand my understanding of clinical reasoning development and constructivist approaches to learning. I refer to clinical reasoning strategies that correlate with my study and suggest relationships. I discuss methods I have developed for promoting the learning of these clinical reasoning skills by our occupational therapy students. The teaching and learning strategies reflect

The notion of 'balanced' bilingual development has often been used to refer to two languages which are spoken with equal proficiency during bilingual language acquisition. However, it is still not known how 'equal' the proficiencies of the two languages should be in order to achieve 'balanced' bilingualism. This case study aims to capture this notion of 'balanced' by using the following quantitative measures with respect to grammatical development: mean length of utterance (MLU), upper bound (UB) and lexical diversity (D). Direct comparison between two sets of absolute values does not reliably predict a bilingual child's language dominance due to potential typological differences two languages. The obtained values of these measures are shown to be comparable with those of monolingual children acquiring each language, and thus it is argued that bilingual children who attain such competence in each language are considered as having 'balanced' bilingual development.
This study concerns particularly two aspects of bilingual children: a) grammatical development and b) language use in terms of mixing. With regard to a), given that cross-linguistic influence is attested across studies of bilingual language development, this case study investigates the domains of null objects and wh-interrogatives to see if any cross-linguistic influence takes place. The qualitative similarities found in all Cantonese-English bilingual subjects suggest that the nature of the cross-linguistic influence is similar, whereas the quantitative differences imply that language dominance has determining effect on the phenomenon.
Concerning b), since language proficiency is often taken as one of the crucial factors predicting language mixing pattern, this present study examines the relationship of the mixing pattern in the Cantonese-English balanced bilingual child and her language proficiency. The results show that mixing occurs more frequently in Cantonese context than in English context.

The study examined knowledge building and scientific understanding in the context of high school students working collaboratively on Knowledge Forum in a chemistry classroom in Hong Kong. Three specific questions were explored: 1) How can knowledge building be assessed and characterized? 2) What are the roles of knowledge building in scientific understanding? and 3) How does the community develop and how do teacher and contextual factors influence its growth and evolution? Participants included 34 Secondary Four students (Grade 10) who worked on knowledge building pedagogy mediated by a computer supported platform called Knowledge Forum for eight months. Various data including Analytic Toolkit statistics (ATK), depth of inquiry, learning portfolios and examination results were examined. Students' Knowledge Forum discourse was also analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings show that 1) a three-pronged approach using ATK, depth of inquiry, and discourse analysis was a suitable tool for tracing both individual and communal growths in knowledge work, 2) knowledge building learning portfolio and the ATK index "linked notes" predicted students' conceptual understanding, and significant differences in students' school examination, a measure of their scientific understanding, were obtained favoring Knowledge Forum students over comparison counterparts, and 3) three distinctive phases were identified suggesting students' growth in epistemic agency; as well as showing how the growth of the community was mediated by contextual and teacher factors. Discourse analysis suggests how knowledge building might be a useful means of promoting scientific understanding at both individual and communal levels interweaving progress in conceptual understanding with growth in views and ways of doing science, thus helping students to move towards both "science learning" and "learning about science". Theoretical and pedagogical significances of the findings and the limitations of this

Due to their logographic nature, Chinese characters are traditionally learned with a whole-word approach. Starting from kindergarten, students in Hong Kong learn Chinese and English words and attain bilingual literacy in this way. However, this type of learning results in low levels of both Cantonese (L1) and English (L2) phonological awareness (PA). Phonological awareness is not only significant for emergent literacy in an alphabetic language but also for decoding unfamiliar words. For this reason, Hong Kong students have difficulty learning to read English (especially sounding out and spelling unfamiliar words). Meanwhile, Chinese readers in mainland China and other places who learn to read Chinese with a phonetic script are found to have higher phonological awareness of Chinese (Bertelson, Chen & de Gelder, 1997; H. Cheung et al., 2001; Holm & Dodd, 1996; Huang & Hanley, 1995; Read et al., 1986).
In light of the advantage brought about by a native phonetic script, the present research aims to investigate the effect of Cantonese phonological awareness on English learning by comparing the performances of an Experimental Group with phonological awareness training and a Control Group without training, both before and after training.
Two experiments were conducted from 2003 to 2004. In the pilot experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 8) which had received 10 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction had no immediate advantage over the control group (n = 9) concerning their post-training English phonological awareness test. However, after the two groups had received 10 hours of English phonics instruction, the Experimental Group a made significantly bigger mean progress than the Control Group (p = 0.035) in their post-training English phonological awareness test. In the main experiment, the Experimental Group (n = 19) which had received 20 hours of Cantonese Romanisation instruction made a bigger mean progress than Control Group 1 (n = 20) and Control Group

This study attempts to understand how students construct their knowledge in a new learning environment guided by constructivist learning principles as well as to find out whether such environment can produce a deeper learning outcome than one that is based on existing mode of classroom teaching.
A constructivist learning environment includes such crucial elements as intentional learning, active, authentic and cooperative learning. This involves using information technology to build up learning community as well as encourage learners to obtain information for knowledge construction.
A quasi-experimental design was employed. The experimental group comprised of 16 students taking a Social Policy Issues course via an online learning environment while the comparison group comprised of 18 students attending the same course in the existing classroom teaching. All students came from the same class studying in the final year of the BSW program of the University of Hong Kong. Background information indicated that the two groi.lps of students were largely, homogeneous.
The outcome indicates that students had a positive evaluation of the online learning environment. However, the learning outcome analyzed by the SOLO Taxonomy does not show any significant difference. The students with better performance are more active in logging on the online course and post more messages on the bulletin board.
Patterns of students' participation in the bulletin board discussion were analyzed Students were enthusiastic in the beginning and the more active students tended to remain so throughout the course. Quality of postings improved with time on each discussion topic. Quite a few students reported that they preferred reading others' postings than giving their opinions. Teachers' roles were investigated. Giving encouragement, asking short and thought provoking questions and summarizing students' discussion were considered important for students' learning.
The study suggests