There is a strong need to understand, monitor, and enhance educational quality. This paper reports on a project that developed a framework of indicators for monitoring educational quality in Hong Kong primary schools. The framework was developed through various case studies and 2 large surveys of over 200 Hong Kong primary schools (involving over 650 classes, 3,800 teachers, and 20,000 students) during 1991-95. A preliminary framework, based on the research literature, included indicators at the student individual level, the classroom level, the teacher individual level, the teacher group level, and the organizational level. The framework was tested and developed through the 2 surveys (the first conducted in 1992 and the second in 1993-94) and a total of 12 case studies. Survey data was used to map the education profiles of Hong Kong primary schools by means on indicators; by percentage of schools in high, satisfactory, and low performance; by distribution of schools on each indicator; and by profiles of characteristics of effective and ineffective schools. Six tables and seven figures are included.

Hong Kong children nowadays are undergoing rapid changes in their development. What they experience and encounter in their childhood has profound influence on the development of their behaviours and psychological state of the minds. In this critical period of development, school years, primary school education in particular, form a prominent portion of their childhood. According to Dewey, schools provide the formal environment for learning and for children to assimilate the ways adults think and behave. Research has shown that the school is an important agent of socialization of children (Lau, S., Siu, K.K. and Chik, P.Y., 1988). What children experience and enjoy in schools should henceforth deserve great attention in the community – the policy makers and administrators, curriculum developers, parents, school principals and teachers. Given this, the paper outlines the experience and reflection of the writer on her two week of teaching junior primary pupils. The arrangements are part of the Lecturers' Attachment Scheme jointly organized by the Hong Kong Institute of Education and its partner schools. The aim is to enhance lecturers' understanding of primary classroom teaching contexts and children learning needs. The writer attempted to find out how theory and practice work in the learning of primary children in school environment. A short questionnaire administered to the pupils she taught examines the kind of learning environment children like most. The information collected was useful to substantiate the qualitative interpretive reflection of the writer herself. Implications will also be discussed.
[Copyright © 2000 The Save the Children Fund (Hong Kong).]

Hong Kong is linguistically complex and diverse with three principal languages: Cantonese, English and Putonghua. A substantial debate on the language policies governing the three principal languages has continued for more than two decades among policy-makers and educators. The political transition in 1997 has greatly affected Hong Kong society, including language education. Since then, the HKSAR government has made a series of language policy reforms trying to create a reasonable balance among the three languages in Hong Kong. The policies of ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’ and ‘mother-tongue teaching’ are two of the most significant in terms of controversy and impact. They are now guiding the curriculum design in Hong Kong language education. The goal of the former policy is to train Hong Kong people to be truly biliterate (written English and Chinese) and trilingual (spoken English, Cantonese and Putonghua). However, Hong Kong primary schools presently do not have an agreed method for the implementation of trilingual education. After a comprehensive historical review of the development of language education in Hong Kong schools, this study aims to find out how the ‘biliterate’ and ‘trilingual’ language policy is currently implemented in Hong Kong primary schools. 155 Hong Kong primary schools participated in a questionnaire survey on how trilingual education is implemented in the schools. The findings suggest that the implementation of trilingual education varied significantly from school to school, and the effectiveness of the trilingual education models varied as well. It is hoped that the findings will help us to gain a better understanding of trilingual education in Hong Kong, and the study could lead to some insightful and theoretical contributions to multilingual education in general.
[Copyright © 2015 Wang and Kirkpatrick; licensee Springer.]