Sending children to school is a big issue to thousands of parents. In order to enroll a ‘desirable’ primary school, parents spend plenty of time in getting an application form and to prepare their children to take the grade one admission test. It seems that going to school is very significant in the eye of the parents; however, what is school really meant to children? This study which aims at describing the feelings and thoughts of children about school, interviewed with 54 students in three primary schools. Results show that most children like going to school due to the variety of school lives like meting friends during recesses. Lessons like physical education, arts and craft were very attractive. They also felt that going to school is necessary. Some children believed that the aim of study and the main role of being students was to achieve good results. As educators, we need to listen to children’s voices and examine their perspectives and opinions carefully because they would provide us with a remarkable reflection of how to run an ideal school.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

The purpose of this study was to compare attitudes of final year students in teacher preparation programs in Hong Kong and Taiwan toward including students with disabilities into regular settings, and to further examine the influences of attitudes on the development of adapted physical education programs. A 15-item questionnaire was used to investigate students' attitudes and concerns toward inclusion. Seventy-seven students from Hong Kong and Taiwan participated in this study. The results of the survey indicated that students in Hong Kong and Taiwan philosophically support inclusion, although there were many concerns and different opinions regarding inclusion. The survey indicated that students from both locations thought special schools and teachers with special training will provide better education for students with disabilities than general teachers, and indicated the needs for more academic preparation for inclusion. The findings also suggest that without well prepared support services and other accommodations, students with disabilities will not benefit from these educational environments.
[Copyright © 2005 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

The concern to develop rigorous techniques of assessment for sandwich placement performance seems to be motivated by a number of considerations. Assessment, as is often argued, helps to give the placement, and the experiential learning, which occurs, in the placement, due academic weight, and hence the integration of theory and practice would be given a higher priority. Furthermore, assessment of placement performance is occasionally implicitly used as a proxy for the evaluation of the idea of sandwich placements per se. it is argued here that none of these motives for assessment is strong enough to justify the disruption to placements that an undue emphasis on assessment may produce, and that the final reason, i.e. that assessment stands proxy for evaluation, is just plain illogical. It can be argued therefore, that the use of assessment is to facilitate genuine, meaningful experiential learning; part of a ‘conversation’ between students and teachers (whether placement tutor or on-placement supervisor), which is aimed at an ongoing negotiation of significant personal objectives and an appraisal of the students’ success in fulfilling them. In addition, that the summative assessment processes, as a human and social enterprise, involves three phases: 1. the perception of relevant students’ behaviour; 2. the judgement as to its quality as placement performance, and 3. the communication of this assessment to an audience. When analyzing these processes in detail, it can be deducted that they are fraught eith difficulty, and that they certainly ought not to be used to provide the basis for quantitative measure. In addition, these problems are not amenable to technical solution, that is, there is no possible measuring technique, which could magically render the human process of erecting a scale of measurement of performance. Yet it is justifiable to require an overall report of placement performance. Hence, it is suggested that a qualitative account includes a transcript of

School-based Assessment (SBA) in English Language is a new core component recently included in the Hong Kong university entrance public examination. It goes together with the promotion of an assessment for learning culture, in which enhancing students' learning is the major concern. This initiative marks an important and ambitious change in examination policy and school practice. Besides its assessment function, feedback forms a prominent tool in facilitating student progress in learning. It is important to understand students' perspectives towards feedback as students' ability to learn from feedback relates to their capacity to make sense of and apply feedback to further their learning. This study looks at students' perceptions of feedback in SBA and whether students react to feedback as a means to 'feed-forward'. The data were gathered from forty-five Form 5 (Grade 11) students in 3 schools through student focus groups and semi-structured interview with teachers. Findings suggest that students did not react in the same way to assessment feedback. Not all students had the strategies to effectively collect, organize and use feedback. The findings suggest that it is through mutual construction of achievement and improvement that students can become active participants in the process of classroom assessment and feedback.
[Copyright © Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA)].

Empirical Research Background: Recent waves of Fullbright and other charity foundations‘ sponsored American English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) integration into tertiary module teaching and learning in Asian countries, has raised concerns whether the ETAs are welcomed by students. Empirical Research Aims: The present study discusses the development and piloting of an instrument to evaluate students‘ perspectives of ETAs‘ role in module teaching and learning in a tertiary context in Hong Kong. Empirical Research Sample: Participants were 153 students from modules that involved ETAs, ranging from first to third year students of four year undergraduate programmes. Empirical Research Method: Students were asked to rate their agreement to 20 statements related to ETAs‘ role in and out of classroom situations on a 4-point category. Empirical Research RASCH: Rasch analysis was used to determine the fit and reliability of the items and the performance of the category structures. Empirical Research Results: Adequate item and person separations were found for all items except for two. Repeated analysis without these items showed improvements in item and person fit and separations. Individual item category structures were generally found to fulfill Linacre‘s (2004) eight guidelines for well performing categories. Empirical Research Conclusions: The resulting 18-item tool is suitable for future evaluations of ETA‘s role in module teaching and learning in tertiary context.