In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) assesses the quality of services provided to children in local kindergartens. Quality Review (QR) reports of kindergartens that pass the assessment are published on EDB’s website. We conducted a content analysis of 164 QR reports to examine the alignment between the music activities alluded to and the curriculum objectives established for music in official policies. A coding scheme was developed using both inductive and deductive approaches. High inter-reliability was obtained. MAXQDA was used to conduct word frequency, descriptive, and co-occurrence analyses. The most common terms identified in the music-related segments focused on children’s development of sensory abilities through music experiences, in relation to singing, rhythm, beat, movement, and instrumental music. However, activities intended to foster musical creativity and self-expression were seldom mentioned. We conclude that the QR reports reveal important discrepancies between official curriculum policies and actual classroom practices, which EDB assessors seemed to ignore or overlook. Implications focus on the need for kindergarten stakeholders to address curriculum/practice gaps and further prepare teachers to foster children’s musical creativity. Copyright © 2022 Yan Lam HO, Alfredo Bautista.

Educational researchers, policymakers, and administrators agree that providing in-service teachers with high-quality professional development (PD) opportunities is essential to educational success. Despite the substantial sums invested in teacher PD by countries and jurisdictions, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused serious challenges to teacher learning around the world. As conventional face-to-face initiatives became impracticable (e.g., workshops, conferences, school-based PD) and the need to prioritize pandemic-specific topics intensified (e.g., emergency remote teaching), teacher PD was recast both formally (where and how teachers engaged in PD) and substantively (what teachers sought to learn from PD). Amidst the international upheavals caused by COVID-19, how have teacher PD infrastructures (policies, practices, theories) responded? For this Special Issue, we put this and other questions before a panel of PD scholars in six contexts: United States, Scotland (United Kingdom), Uruguay, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong (SAR China). In their respective contributions, authors discuss issues such as the limitations of PD systems based on compliance and external accountability mechanisms, the need to center teacher motivation in existing PD frameworks, matters of access and equity, the importance of developing technological infrastructures for online and hybrid learning, problems of online safety and wellbeing, and more. The Special Issue shows that the uncertainty of today’s times requires new, global perspectives on PD design, implementation, evaluation, theory, and scholarship. To nurture agentic, highly motivated, and effective teachers for the pandemic era and beyond, countries and jurisdictions should think more creatively about how to best support teacher learning. Copyright © 2022 International Journal for Research in Education.

In this case study, the author research on the current teaching phenomena of Paper 3: Creating of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examination Elective Subjects: Music. The examination has been implemented after the curriculum reform of the senior secondary school since 2012 where music composition becomes one of the compulsory assessment. According to the Curriculum and Assessment Guide (Secondary 4-6) Music by the Curriculum Development Council and the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority, the assessment objective is to create and arrange music using appropriate compositional devices, and explain the use of music elements in compositional devices of their compositions. Without any prior experiences in the teaching composing for public examination in the past, schools have adopted different models to teach composition which include hiring external company and tutor to teach; forming a joint-school network; and teaching the whole curriculum by the school teacher. This qualitative study contributes to the understanding of the current HKDSE learning and teaching situation with a focus on the perspectives from school music teachers and composer-instructors. Copyright © 2021 Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Despite English being a priority in China and extensive policy changes over the past decades, English language teaching and learning at Chinese tertiary institutions remains insufficient. College English (CE) courses focus on holistic and humanistic education by teaching English for general purposes. However, they are often inefficient and unable to serve university students’ needs. Researchers and practitioners alike call for a transition from CE to English for Academic Purposes (EAP). This study explored pre-service teachers’ perceptions of EAP provision in mainland China through a qualitative, interpretive approach. Sixteen pre-service teachers, who completed their bachelor's education in China and master's education in Hong Kong, participated in semi-structured interviews, sharing their experiences and discussing the challenges and opportunities for EAP to serve as a replacement for or supplement to CE. Thematic analysis revealed complexities comprising current education, the traditional, top-down system, learning styles, status, and lack of professional development opportunities. This paper discusses the challenges of implementing EAP in mainland China in an effort to help policymakers, researchers, and practitioners identify the way out. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The Hong Kong Early Child Development Scale (HKECDS) is a tool for assessing holistic early child development in preschoolers aged from three to six years. The original version of the scale, HKECDS, was updated in 2019 (HKECDS-2) to reflect the contemporary context and local curricular expectations. Children (n = 144) from three kindergartens in Hong Kong completed the HKECDS-2 in individual sessions. Rasch model analysis and expert discussions resulted in a short version of the scale (HKECDS-3) with 50 items in nine domains. The domains are Personal and self-care (4 items), Language development (7 items), Pre-academic learning (10 items), Cognitive development (6 items), Gross motor (4 items), Fine motor (2 items), Health and safety (5 items), Moral development (6 items), and Society and environment (6 items). There were significant correlations between findings from the updated version of the tool, HKECDS-3 and the HKECDS-2 (long form), and older children had significantly higher scores than younger children. Copyright © 2022 by THE PACIFIC EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION.

Background and Objectives: Most primary progressive aphasia (PPA) literature is based on English language users. Linguistic features that vary from English, such as logographic writing systems, are underinvestigated. The current study characterized the dysgraphia phenotypes of patients with PPA who write in Chinese and investigated their diagnostic utility in classifying PPA variants.Methods: This study recruited 40 participants with PPA and 20 cognitively normal participants from San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We measured dictation accuracy using the Chinese Language Assessment for PPA (CLAP) 60-character orthographic dictation test and examined the occurrence of various writing errors across the study groups. We also performed voxel-based morphometry analysis to identify the gray matter regions correlated with dictation accuracy and prevalence of writing errors.Results: All PPA groups produced significantly less accurate writing responses than the control group and no significant differences in dictation accuracy were noted among the PPA variants. With a cut score of 36 out of 60 in the CLAP orthographic dictation task, the test achieved sensitivity and specificity of 90% and 95% in identifying Chinese participants with PPA vs controls. In addition to a character frequency effect, dictation accuracy was affected by homophone density and the number of strokes in semantic variant PPA and logopenic variant PPA groups. Dictation accuracy was correlated with volumetric changes over left ventral temporal cortices, regions known to be critical for orthographic long-term memory. Individuals with semantic variant PPA frequently presented with phonologically plausible errors at lexical level, patients with logopenic variant PPA showed higher preponderance towards visual and stroke errors, and patients with nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA commonly exhibited compound word and radical errors. The prevalence of phonologically plausible, visual, and compound word errors was

The ability to formulate problems is an important part of computational thinking (CT) development for nurturing creative problem solvers. However, problem formulation is inadequately addressed in primary school education. This study aimed to investigate the problem formulation processes of primary school students. Students from eight winning teams in a primary school CT competition in Hong Kong participated in the study. Focus group interviews were conducted with the students and teachers separately. Data analysis revealed that the students’ problem formulation processes could be divided into three stages, namely, the Find, Investigate, and Define stages. The Investigate stage was an essential stage connecting the Find and Define stages. Interviews showed that support from teachers and parents was necessary for students to gain a positive experience of formulating problems in primary school context. Findings suggest that CT curriculum should be designed to allocate sufficient project time and learning space for students to develop their problem formulation ability. Problem formulation abilities are critical in the development of students’ creativity in computational thinking. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This mixed-methods study investigates whether and to what extent positive psychology constructs (classroom enjoyment, grit, and growth mindset) and Extramural English predict primary school students’ willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) both in the classroom (a fictitious but common setting for English communication among English as an Foreign Language [EFL] students) and outside the classroom (a natural and increasingly prevalent environment for EFL communication). We collect and analyze survey data from 160 EFL primary school students in Hong Kong (ages 6–13 years old). Hierarchical regression analyses reveal that L2 WTC in the classroom is predicted by classroom enjoyment, grit, and Extramural English. A slightly different picture emerges outside of the classroom, with grit, growth mindset, and Extramural English predicting L2 WTC. Semi-structured interviews (N = 8) confirm and elaborate on the quantitative findings. Our findings suggest that through grit- and Extramural English-integrated intervention programmes, EFL teachers can improve young learners’ L2 WTC both inside and outside the classroom. Furthermore, teachers can improve young learners’ L2 WTC in the classroom by creating a positive learning environment, while also improving their L2 WTC outside of the classroom by cultivating their growth mindset system. Copyright © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Creativity is an important 21st Century skill that enhances students’ ability to see new opportunities, confront new challenges, and adapt flexibly to the changing study, work and life situations. To nurture students with strong self-efficacy in creative thinking is as important as the contexts and strategies involved in its application. But how to develop sustainable interventions (without generating excessive workload for teachers) to promote students’ self-efficacy in creativity is a long-lasting challenge. This study presents a simple and relatively cost-effective instructional intervention, i.e., self-assessment mind maps, and examines its effect on students’ self-efficacy in creativity, self-efficacy in learning English, and academic performance in English language tests. A pretest-posttest non-equivalent design was adopted for the experimental and control groups of students in a Hong Kong primary school in 2021/22 Spring semester. The results show that students from the experimental group significantly outperformed those from the control group on self-efficacy in creativity after the intervention. However, the intervention did not improve students’ self-efficacy and test performance in English learning. The findings demonstrate the potential of self-assessment mind maps as an effective and sustainable instruction intervention to promote students’ higher-order abilities. This study sheds light on designing sustainable instructional strategies for empowerment in creativity. Copyright © 2022 Yan, Lee, Hui and Lao.

Concerns of equity with respect to the community college model in East Asia persist in educational research. In this study, we described and analysed students’ “lived experience” in community colleges in Hong Kong in terms of the “warming up” or “cooling out” of their educational desire. Semistructured interviews with 14 graduates of community colleges in Hong Kong were conducted to determine how their experiences at community colleges affected their educational expectations and the extent to which community colleges help students reconsider their educational disadvantages in a competitive, meritocratic and massified higher education system. The qualitative interview data were inductively thematised into four aspects of college experience in relation to their educational expectations. The data revealed that Hong Kong’s community colleges help some students develop their capabilities and change their educational expectations through democratic admissions, liberal pedagogic environments, learner-centred formative assessment and student services for strategic university articulation. Rather than cooling-out students’ educational desire (characterised by gradual disengagement, objective denial, alternative achievement), community colleges in Hong Kong provide a second chance for failing and disadvantaged students to pursue a university education, but this warming-up function applies only to students who benefitted from the liberal mode of assessment and discovered and developed their academic capabilities in their college experience. The paper ends with a critical analysis of the problem of such warming up of educational desire and the extent to which community colleges can empower disadvantaged students for a good life. Copyright © 2022 The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc.