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.

The article discusses a study on educational research assessment in Australia in context of Excellence of Research for Australia (ERA) done in Hong Kong. Topics include combination of expert review and indicators for research assessment, methodology of University Grants Committee (UGC), and introduction of research scholarship. It mentions that emphasis of international benchmarking for producing quality profiles of Hong Kong-based UGC-funded institutions.
[Copyright of Australian Educational Researcher is the property of Australian Association for Research in Education. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0110-3]

Debate over educational reform in many countries has addressed the question of how to attract and retain teachers. As part of a multiple case study that includes eight beginning English language teachers in Hong Kong, this article offers an in-depth analysis of the experiences of two participants, Christine and Samuel, during their initial year of full time teaching in Hong Kong schools. The data, collected during an entire academic year, suggests that Christine used her experiences of becoming a teacher to justify and reaffirm her determination to pursue a career within English language teaching. In contrast, Samuel's preliminary year of full-time teaching culminated in his decision to leave the teaching profession. A contribution of this study is to explore these very different experiences and outcomes using a framework of teacher identity construction. From this perspective, findings suggest that the participants' engagement in the practices and activities of teaching, their relations with colleagues, and their positioning within different discourses of teaching and learning by their schools as well as by the wider educational environment, shaped their decisions about whether to continue to pursue a teaching career. Implications for attracting and retaining teachers, as well as for future research, are discussed.
[Copyright of Australian Educational Researcher is the property of Australian Association for Research in Education. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13384-012-0067-7]

Teachers beliefs about their ability to affect students' performance is an important part of professionalism. This study compared 725 Hong Kong and 575 Shanghai primary in-service teachers on their teacher efficacy. Two Chinese versions of the 12-item Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale were used in this study since some wordings of the Hong Kong version of the Scale (HK-TSE) were different from the Shanghai version (STSE) as a result of cultural differences. Basically, the Shanghai teachers reported significantly higher efficacy than did the Hong Kong teachers. After reviewing these quantitative results, 86 follow-up questionnaires from Shanghai in-service teachers who also participated in the first part of this study were collected. Results of this qualitative part showed that the three most commonly cited factors for the contribution of teacher efficacy were: respect and confidence placed in them by students and parents, the training they received from universities and the experience they gained from daily teaching practice. Though Hong Kong in-service teachers had lower efficacy scores than the Shanghai counterparts.
[Copyright of Australian Educational Researcher is the property of Australian Association for Research in Education.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.aare.edu.au/aer/about.htm]