Gifted education in Hong Kong reflects the Chinese tradition of valuing and nurturing special abilities in children. Thus, identifying and selecting gifted and talented students into programs are central. Currently, procedures in Hong Kong generally emphasize the use of standardized instruments for identifying the intellectually gifted (using the Hong Kong Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children or Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices), the academically gifted (using the Hong Kong Attainment Tests), and the creatively gifted (using the Chinese versions of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking or the Wallach-Kogan Tests). Advocating the use of multiple criteria, educators in Hong Kong also employ informal measures such as nominations and rating scales. The complexity of the identification process was illustrated with the Chinese University Summer Gifted Program procedures of nomination, screening, and selection based on multiple measures and the ultimate criteria of matching individual specific needs with program services available. The issues regarding students being labeled as gifted or nongifted as a result of identification, the all-or-none misconception of giftedness, and the need to design and evaluate multiple measures and identification procedures are discussed.
[Copyright of Roeper Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/02783190009554008 ]

Inclusion of students with disabilities into regular schools is now one of the most significant issues facing the education community both nationally and internationally. In order to address this issue there is widespread acceptance that teacher training institutions must ensure that new teachers are trained to teach effectively in classrooms where there are students with a variety of learning needs. Utilizing a data set of 603 pre-service teachers from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore this study reports the effects of training in inclusive education on pre-service teacher attitudes towards inclusion, their sentiments about people with a disability and their concerns about inclusion. The results are discussed in relation to a range of factors that could have produced different gains in their attitudes, sentiments and concerns among cohorts from different countries.
[Copyright of Disability & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687590802469271]

This study examined four goal orientations and their relationships to achievement among 1041 Chinese gifted students in Hong Kong. These students endorsed learning and social goals over performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals. The endorsement of learning goals emerged consistently as the significant predictor predicting achievement in academic, non-academic, and social/leadership areas. Implications of the findings for coordinating different goal orientations for enhancing achievement in different areas are discussed.
[Copyright of High Ability Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598130801980307]

Previous studies have provided equivocal results regarding the use of teacher and parent ratings in identifying gifted students. This study explored their use through identifying those student behavioral characteristics on which such judgments were based, assessing their correspondence with student self-report data, and evaluating the differences between teacher and parent ratings. Teachers and parents of 109 gifted students (45 boys and 64 girls) provided ratings using Chinese versions of the Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students (SRBCSS) (Renzulli, Smith, White, Callahan & Hartman, 1976). Results show a greater relevance for measuring leadership and motivation characteristics, and less relevance on creativity characteristics. Also, scales appear not to be good predictors of student self-report data on IQ, creativity and leadership. However, the Chinese SRBCSS was nevertheless demonstrated to be a viable instrument, yielding important data not available by self-report instruments for identifying gifted students.
[Copyright of High Ability Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13598130050032190]