This paper explores how parents in Hong Kong perceive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of academic and non-academic private tutoring (PT) for their children, using a thematic analysis of interviews with 80 parents from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We seek to understand the role of PT in parents' thinking about their children's learning and developmental needs in uncertain times, which foregrounds parents' temporalities in the face of disruption. We find that maintaining pre-pandemic PT levels was the most common attitude for almost half of the sample, followed by roughly similar groups of parents who increased or decreased their use of PT. Parental perceptions of the functions of PT converged on three main uses: mitigating the effects of schooling disruptions, making productive use of newfound free time and providing a sense of normality. Using a timescapes lens, we identify temporal elements in how PT factored into parents' experiences and perceptions of managing 'gained' and 'lost' time, adapting to remote learning, avoiding health risks and reflecting on inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © 2023 Taylor & Francis.

Adopting the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), this sequential mixed-methods research investigates Hong Kong kindergarten teachers’ reported beliefs and practices regarding early visual arts education (EVAE). The qualitative part (Phase 1) is an interview study of 19 kindergarten teachers in two focus groups, aiming to develop a conceptual structure of teachers’ behavioural, normative and control beliefs. The quantitative part (Phase 2) is a survey study of 243 teachers from the randomly sampled 21 kindergartens regarding their EVAE beliefs and practices. Most teachers believe in child-centred teaching while practising teacher-directed instruction and support creativity while delivering closed-ended instruction. Four influential factors are identified to account for this gap: (1) practising child-centred pedagogies as a result of behavioural beliefs; (2) undervaluing visual arts as a result of normative beliefs; (3) instructing children directly as a result of normative beliefs; and (4) delivering subject knowledge in studio teaching as a result of control beliefs. These findings imply that Hong Kong kindergarten teachers struggle between two approaches and suffer from a lack of support from educational authorities and society. There is an urgent need to develop appropriate practices for visual arts education in Hong Kong kindergartens. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This study aims to compare auditory temporal processing and phonological processing across locations and age levels and to test the direct and indirect effects of auditory temporal and phonological processing on proficiency in Chinese character reading. We recruited 108 typically developing children — 25 and 24 kindergarteners from Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively, and 34 and 25 primary school students from Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively. Our findings showed that, before learning PCS, the languages’ phonological complexity did not affect the importance of ATP in Chinese reading. Also, we found the use of PCS could lead to a direct effect from students’ ATP to Chinese character reading as well as through phonological awareness. Our findings indicated that ways of learning to read influence children’s patterns of cognitive and linguistic abilities, which should be considered in teaching designs for reading. Copyright © 2023 Fundacion Infancia y Aprendizaje.