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]

Based on the data of a school-referred sample of Cantonese-speaking Chinese children who met the Hong Kong criterion of dyslexia, the authors estimated for developmental dyslexia of Chinese children aged between 6 and 10 in Hong Kong an incidence rate of 0.66 percent and a gender ratio of 3.29 boys to 1 girl over a four-year period. They also explored the differences in estimates based on this Hong Kong criterion that emphasizes cognitive markers with more conventional discrepancy- based criteria. In view of the possible biases in self-selection and underreporting in the data of the school-referred sample, the authors compared the figures with those derived from the sample of the normative study of the Hong Kong Test of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing, which yielded an estimate of 9.7 percent in prevalence rate and boy-girl gender ratio of 2 to 1 over a one- year period. The differences in estimates based on the two samples and implications of the findings are discussed in light of the limitations of the study.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404150802093695]

The relationships among emotional intelligence, social coping, and psychological distress were investigated in a sample of 624 Chinese gifted students in Hong Kong. A mediation-effect model specifying that emotional intelligence had an effect on psychological distress mediated by social coping was hypothesized and tested using structural equation modeling procedures. For comparison, a direct-effect model and a direct-and-mediation-effect model were also fitted to the data. The results indicated that the mediation-effect model provided an adequate and good fit, suggesting that the effects of self-relevant and other-relevant emotional intelligence on psychological distress were mediated by avoidant coping and social-interaction coping, respectively. Implications of the findings for enhancing emotional intelligence of students and in promoting the use of adaptive social coping strategies for their psychological well-being 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/10.1080/13598163060617589]