Introduction: Understanding the sources and the effects of collective teacher efficacy has been one of the central interests to many educational researchers and practitioners, because it is critical to understand how teachers can shape, and are shaped by, the educational processes in schools. Following the social cognitive perspective on the sources and consequences of efficacy beliefs, this study examined how school support influences collective teacher efficacy which in turn affects teachers’ organizational commitment. Method: The participants included 969 teachers sampled from 28 primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong. To appropriately address the nature of collective teacher efficacy and school support as school-level variables, the doubly latent multilevel structural equation modeling approach was used to analyze the data. Results: The results revealed the mediation mechanism played by collective teacher efficacy in explaining the effect of school support on teachers’ organizational commitment. Discussion: Schools are suggested to consider fostering a supportive school environment as a strategy to improve teachers’ collective efficacy beliefs if it is wished to enhance teachers’ commitment to schools. Copyright © 2023 Zhang, Lee, Yin and Yang.

The procrastination assessment scale for students (PASS) has been used widely in evaluating the patterns of university students’ procrastination on academic tasks and their procrastination behavior. The present study validated the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the PASS (PASS-C) by recruiting two representative independent sample of Hong Kong Chinese university students (S1 used in the EFA study: 506; S2 used in the CFA study: 506). The results confirmed that this modified Chinese version is a valid and appropriate tool to assess university students’ procrastination tendencies in Chinese educational settings. Copyright © 2022 Yip and Chung.

This article illustrates the social construction of teachers’ emotions by drawing on the emergent sociological perspective of inhabited institutionalism to report on a qualitative research project on teachers’ emotions in Hong Kong. A thematic analysis was performed on the transcripts of interviews conducted in 2012 with 21 teachers at Hong Kong secondary schools and on the policy documents and newspaper articles from the education reform era of 1980 to 2011. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the institutional logic of whole-person education, (2) the institutional logic of accountability, and (3) an asymmetry between these institutional logics, which is causing a displacement of the meaning of education and thus has emotional consequences for teachers. Taken together, these themes show that managerialist education reforms bring the institutional logic of accountability into the institutional environment of education, which results in the recoupling of school administration and teachers’ work. This recoupling leads to the decline of teachers’ work autonomy. The institutional logic of accountability tends to inhibit the institutional logic of whole-person education and to replace the instructional meaning of education with managerial meanings. In the institutional context, teachers are forced to do a lot of work that they interpret as meaningless, but they find that they are powerless to change the situation. They may therefore choose to inhabit the institutional logic of accountability and the tightly coupled institutional context of school organizations. Consequently, teachers may become unhappy at work during and after managerialist education reforms. According to these findings, teachers’ emotions can be regarded as an interactional–institutional construction. That is, teachers’ emotions may be socially constructed through the negotiation of meaning under the institutional logics that guide their actions and the interactions that uphold the institutional

The study explores the social psychological process of teachers’ emotional experiences. Twenty-one secondary schoolteachers in Hong Kong were interviewed. The findings show that the teachers generally felt caam² (a Cantonese adjective that covers a range of meanings like gloomy, dreadful, tragic, pitiful, pathetic, and miserable) in teaching. The social psychological process of the emotional experience of caam² involves how teachers interpret the significance of their actual work in attaining the teaching goal of making a difference. If they interpret their work as incapable of fulfilling the goal, they will experience negative emotions in teaching. The findings also suggest that the interpretation is affected by teachers’ power which is unequally distributed according to teachers’ teaching experience and managerial roles. Copyright © 2016 Tsang and Kwong.

Although there are an increasing number of studies on assessing teacher emotions in mainstream education, there is a lack of appropriate measurement tools to evaluate the emotions of teaching assistants (TAs) who need to take care of students with a range of special educational needs (SEN). This study tested the generalizability of the 24-item teacher emotion inventory (TEI), among 204 TAs from 122 secondary schools with inclusive education in Hong Kong. We conducted both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Rasch analysis to test the within-network validity of the TEI. For the between-network validity, we examined the relationships between TAs’ emotions and their attitude toward inclusive education. The Rasch analysis supported the scale’s dimensionality and item fit statistics. The CFA supported the five-factor solution of the TEI. The results also showed statistically significant correlations between positive emotions (joy and love) and TAs’ attitudes toward inclusive education. TAs’ negative emotions (anxiety, anger, and stress) appeared to be negatively correlated with their attitude toward inclusive education. The results supported that TEI is a useful tool to assess the emotions of TAs that play a pivotal role in assisting both school teachers and SEN students, who are more likely to face increased emotional challenges than those not needing to educate SEN students. Implications of this study to enrich the current scope of research on understanding teacher emotions across educational levels and settings are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Yang, Hsu, Ye and Sin.

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.

Emergency online education has been adopted worldwide due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Prior research regarding online learning predominantly focused on the perception of parents, teachers, and students in tertiary education, while younger children’s perspectives have rarely been examined. This study investigated how family, school, and individual factors would be associated with primary school students’ satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, and preference in online learning during COVID-19. A convenient sample of 781 Hong Kong students completed an anonymous online survey from June to October 2020. Logistic regression was conducted for 13 potential factors. Results indicated that only 57% of students were satisfied with their schools’ online learning arrangement and 49.6% regarded the online learning as an effective learning mode. Only 12.8% of students preferred online learning, while 67.2% of students preferred in-person schooling. Multiple analyses suggested that teacher–student interaction during online classes was positively associated with students’ satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, and preferences in online learning. Compared to grades 1–2 students, grades 3–6 students perceived more effectiveness and would prefer online learning. Happier schools were more likely to deliver satisfying and effective online education. Students who reported less happiness at school would prefer online learning, and students who reported less happiness at home would be less satisfied with online learning and reflected lower effectiveness. Teachers are encouraged to deliver more meaningful interactions to students and offer extra support to younger children during online classes. Primary schools and parents are encouraged to create a healthy and pleasant learning environment for children. The government may consider building up happy schools in the long run. The study findings are instrumental for policymakers, institutions, educators, and researchers in

Past research on pathways to cultural influence on judgment has compared the explanatory power of personal preferences, perceived descriptive norms and institutionalization. Positive education is an education movement inspired by Western positive psychology. The present study examined how these factors jointly predict Hong Kong teachers’ evaluation of imported positive education programs in their schools. In a field study, we measured teachers’ personal endorsement of growth mindset (a positive psychology construct developed in the US) and their evaluation of adopting positive education programs in their schools. We also measured teachers’ perception of the extent of institutional and normative support for positive education in their schools. The results show that teachers’ personal preferences for growth mindset predict more favorable evaluation of positive education programs when institutional and normative support for positive education programs are both weak, or when they are both strong. We interpret these effects from the perspectives of the strong situation hypothesis and the intersubjective theory of culture. Copyright © 2020 Chan, Chiu, Lee, Leung and Tong.

The occupational well-being (OWB) of early childhood educators (ECEs) play a crucial role in their job performance, the development of a child, and the operation of early childhood education sectors. OWB of ECEs has been an increasing concern in recent years and this concern might be particularly salient for beginning ECEs given the multiple adaptive changes and challenges they encounter during the transition from training to teaching. However, research on the beginning ECEs’ OWB has been scarce. In this study, we employed both variable-centered and person-centered approaches to explore OWB and examined job demands and resources as predictors in 117 Hong Kong beginning ECEs (113 females, Mage = 21.71 years). They first reported job demands (i.e., class size, working hours, dealing with children with special education needs) and job resources (i.e., salary and job support) at the end of the first month of the fall semester upon working as in-service teachers. They then reported on four OWB variables (i.e., job satisfaction, work engagement, job stress, and job burnout) at the beginning of the spring semester. Results of the variable-centered analysis revealed that beginning ECEs reported medium or above-medium levels on the positive OWB indicators and medium or below-medium levels on the negative OWB indicators. Regression analysis found that despite some exceptions, job demands and job resources negatively (positively) and positively (negatively) predicted positive (negative) OWB indicators, respectively. Results of person-centered analysis suggested that the complex pattern of different OWB indicators could be categorized into two OWB profiles (medium well-being vs. relatively weak well-being – emotional exhaustion). Results of regression analysis showed that beginning ECEs with higher job demands were less likely, whereas those with more job resources were more likely, to be assigned to the medium well-being profile. These results inform which leverage points could

Drawing upon the Triadic Reciprocity Framework, this longitudinal qualitative multiple-case study examined how three Hong Kong secondary English as a second language (ESL) teachers exercised their teacher agency to take control of their teaching and professional development. More specifically, the study aimed at exploring how teachers' intentions and actions for the establishment of their professional identity were afforded and constrained by their workplaces. Findings reveal that these ESL teachers exercised different degrees of proactive, reactive, and passive agency. The four properties of human agency, i.e., intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness, influenced the teachers' proactive, reactive, and passive agency when they responded to personal, behavioral, and environmental determinants. The findings shed light on a three-layered Triadic Reciprocity framework on teacher agency and contributes to a systematic and comprehensive discussion about the various internal and external factors that might exert influences on agency of early career teachers. This study offers pedagogical implications for school teachers, school leaders, and policy makers in Hong Kong and beyond. Copyright ©2021 Frontiers Media SA.