為提升學校教育質素，1997年教育統籌委員會第七號報告書特別提出須考慮包括學生的個人成就發展、學生在主要教育範疇表現的指標，即與輔導有關的過程和產出指標。而1999年教育統籌委員會的廿一世紀教育藍圖諮詢文件，更重申發展學生心性及多元智能是邁向優質教育的必經之路。有關措施自1992年實施至今，其成效如何？是否能為學校帶來預期的效果──培養學生良好的行為，加強他們的自我形象？甚至帶來優質學校教育？本文旨在報告一個探討校本輔導計劃在本港學校推行成效的研究結果。研究結果顯示：雖然自校本輔導計劃推行後，學童在課室的表現較前合作，社交能力較為進步，師生關係也較密切，但似乎有關學校仍未能掌握及有效將輔導理念實，與原有的推行目標仍有距離。文中除分析上述情況外，也表列了一些值得再作探討的問題，最後提出啟示，冀學校能透過改善校本輔導的質素，讓學生能增進自我形象，強化良好行為，使優質學校教育的精神能真正在學校落實。
[Copyright © 2001 優質學校教育學報.]

Teachers have often been placed in the heart of educational reform. They are expected to play a pivotal role in the enhancement of educational quality. Various forces energize the professionalization project of teaching and there has long been advocacy that teachers should be regarded as professionals. Although literature shows that there are divided views on whether it is entirely favorable for teaching to become a 'profession', there is little disparity that teachers should uphold professionalism. While teachers as professionals may well be a conception that denotes different meanings by different people, this paper seeks to understand the conceptions of a professional teacher held by four fist year primary school teachers in Hong Kong. The paper reports the results of a study which entails three main parts. The first part is about the societal expectations of a professional teacher in Hong Kong. With reference to the profession literature, selections of key educational documents of Hong Kong were analyzed to find out the common expectations. The second part involves the analysis of the first year teachers' conceptions of what makes a professional teacher. Each of the four teachers have been followed through in the first year of teaching by four in-depth face to face interviews and at least three telephone interviews. Their conceptions of a professional teacher have been studied and analyzed in the context of their career events. The third part of the paper identifies the similarities and differences of the conceptions between those identified as the societal expectations and those held by the informants. The paper ends with a discussion on the various implications of the findings.

How Chinese language proficiency can be enhanced is a key concern in the Hong Kong community. As the current literature suggests that student teachers' beliefs and past experience show great impact on the effectiveness of their learning to teach, this researcher made an attempt to investigate pre-service teachers' perceptions of teaching and learning Chinese in primary schools - a survey that involved 501 student teachers was conducted. The key findings include, first, over 80% of the respondents rated their own Chinese proficiency average or above average, and over 10% respondents considered themselves poor in the mastery of Chinese. Second, while a total of 86% of the respondents considered themselves average or good at speaking Chinese, they still expressed the need to receive more training in oral presentation and writing. And third, among the 13 prescribed teaching objectives set in the syllabi of Chinese, "fostering students' thinking ability" came first in the survey responents' ranking of the importance of teaching objectives, reflecting they needed training in both the subject knowledge of Chinese and pedagogical content knowledge.
[Copyright © 2002 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This study examines the impact of principal leadership practices on student academic outcomes in four Hong Kong primary schools. Given the increased accountability mechanisms confronting schools in Hong Kong, this study is based on the assumption that principal practices that respond directly to accountability policy or link to human resources development will be most influential. This does not necessarily contradict the assumption that principal leadership practices are generic and contextualised. This study will adopt a case study design. The data will be collected from 4 local schools with varied strategies, including online student math tests, and teacher questionnaire surveys. The student math test items will be selected from item banks of standardised tests. The questionnaires will be adapted from Walker and Ko’s (2011) and Leithwood and Jantzi’ s (2000) scales respectively, each covering extensively 7 dimensions with the number of items reduced to 33. The test scores will be aggregated and standardised, and used as student academic outcomes. The two questionnaires will be combined and used for the teacher survey. They will attempt to measure teachers’ perceptions of principal leadership practices and conditions in the schools. The individual responses of the participants will be aggregated to the person level and school level, and then subjected to descriptive, comparative, and inferential statistical analyses. Factors from both principal leadership practices and school conditions that synergistically contribute to student achievement will be indentified and verified, and effects specified. Given the limited number of schools in the sample, findings at the teacher and student levels will be triangulated and discussed as rich descriptions of cases. It is hoped that it will inform practitioners and researchers the interrelatedness between principal leadership practices, school conditions, and student achievement. The findings may also generate some indicative findings

This study tests mediated principal leadership effects on teacher professional learning through collegial trust, communication, and collaboration in Hong Kong primary schools. It is based on a series of single mediator studies, and uses the same convenience sample of 970 teachers from 32 local primary schools. It also adopts Hayes’ (2013) regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping method, to examine and compare sizes and proportions of potential mediating effects of the three human relational variables. The findings affirm the role and nature trust, communication, and collaboration play in the mediated relationship. In contrast, the mediating power of collaboration is non-significantly stronger than that of communication, and is more than doubled that of trust. The conclusion is that, a school environment featuring mutual trust, effective communication, and genuine collaboration is a core condition for teacher learning and change. Provided that the forces that bind people together in schools are multiple, principals are recommended to create school culture and conditions strategically for teacher learning to thrive.