This study examined the direct and indirect relationships of children's overexcitabilities with their playfulness and creative potential in the kindergarten context. Participants were parents and teachers of 140 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children (47.9% girls, mean age = 52.2 months). Parents reported their children's overexcitabilities (imaginational, psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, and emotional), and teachers rated children's playfulness (physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor) and creative potential (creative personality traits) as demonstrated in the classrooms. Hierarchical regression revealed that controlling for child age, gender, and parental education, children's social and cognitive spontaneity were significant correlates of their creative potential as perceived by the teachers. Moreover, results from the path analytic model showed that the positive relationship between intellectual overexcitability and creative potential was fully mediated by cognitive spontaneity. In contrast, the indirect relationship through social spontaneity was non-significant. The findings suggest that children's daily imaginative and inventive peer play in kindergarten may be conducive to their creative potential. Practically, results underscore the utility of creating a preschool play environment that embraces children's choice, autonomy, and originality while promoting peer interaction and collaboration, as such an approach may cultivate their creative potential. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Critical thinking, as a highly valued generic skill, lies at the heart of education worldwide. Although research suggests a close relationship between language and thinking, the integration of critical thinking into second language acquisition is under-investigated. This study therefore explores the viability of exploratory talk and WebQuests for critical-thinking development in learners of English as a second language. The study constitutes an exploratory cycle of a 'design research' project conducted in a primary school in Hong Kong. The project as a whole collected data from five different sources (i.e. tests of critical thinking, audio-recordings of group discussions, classroom observations, students' written work, and interviews with teachers) and had 125 Primary Five student participants (aged 11-12) and five English teacher participants. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative findings on classroom dialogue, this study reveals the participating students to have displayed critical thinking through the use of explicit reasoning and exploratory talk in group discussions. The findings have pedagogical implications, offer suggestions for critical-thinking cultivation in the English-as-a-second-language context and contribute to scholarly understanding of the need to integrate instructional strategies for critical thinking into language classrooms. Copyright ©2021 Elsevier .

Creativity literature was criticized for its bias towards conventional areas (e.g. arts), and creativity studies in domains less concerned about creativity, such as environmental sustainability (ES), are rare. This study aimed to understand the development of "creativity for ES" (pro-ES creativity) of common tertiary students. Based on a pro-environmental behaviour model and a pro-sustainability competence model found in literature, a pro-ES creative learning curriculum was designed and integrated into an existing toy course in a university of Hong Kong. A total of 20 students from three cohorts were interviewed, and their feedback was analysed inductively with open-coding by the consensus of two experts. Together with their affecting factors, five learning outcomes emerged as attributes of pro-ES creativity: sensitivity and problem-finding; creative problem-solving abilities; affinity for self-creating life-style; creative systems thinking and futures thinking; and reconceptualization of creativity and ES. This study discovered that creativity, as a kind of self-actualization, had developed both individual competences and intrinsic motivation, which are conducive to life-long self-determining ES behaviours. This study informs the education field that the five attributes of pro-ES creativity can be enhanced in a curriculum based on a simple everyday theme. As such, pro-ES creativity education can be integrated into many existing curricula. Going beyond ES, this study shed light on creativity studies of other less popular areas. It suggested a dual domain-specific-general creativity education approach and a dual deductive-inductive research approach for developing creativity theories and curriculum of "low-creativity" domains. Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A quasi-experimental research study is reported in this paper. Its aim was to evaluate the effects of different types of pedagogy on the cultivation of students' critical thinking dispositions. One hundred and forty Secondary 4 students (i.e. tenth-grade students at 15–17 years of age) from two Hong Kong schools joined a teaching intervention in which they learnt strategies of argumentation through an established critical thinking framework (i.e. Kuhn's model The Skills of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991]). Analysis revealed collaborative group work to exert positive impacts on students' development of critical thinking when used in conjunction with explicit instruction in reasoning and evidence-based justifications during the intervention. The research results also showed the students who received teacher guidance to have engaged more interactively in joint learning tasks, thereby illustrating the important role of the teacher in facilitating group discussions.
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This study explored the effects of the classroom learning environment of a Liberal Studies course on the critical thinking skills and disposition of 3,869 Grade 12 students in Hong Kong. Through combining both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, a two-level model of the classroom learning environment for critical thinking with seven dimensions (i.e., Student Negotiation, Challenging Task, Multiple Perspectives, Shared Control, Skeptical Voice, Uncertainty and Personal Relevance) at the first level and three broader aspects (i.e., Pedagogy, Relationship and Content) at the second was generated. The correlation and structural equation modelling analyses indicated that the classroom learning environment had a stronger relationship with critical thinking disposition than skills. Structural equation modelling analysis also indicated a mediation effect of critical thinking disposition between the classroom learning environment and critical thinking skills. It is suggested that different approaches be combined so as to achieve a balanced development of students’ critical thinking skills and disposition.
[Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V.]

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of creative understanding, this paper aims to investigate children’s creative learning of drama education in a group of preschoolers aged 4–5 in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The research was designed originally to offer a case study to identify the emergence of creative learning during and after drama lessons, and investigate its relation to teaching. The field observations, however, noticed the contrary effect brought by a product-oriented and a teacher-centred approach of teaching. These approaches had strongly undermined the stimulus to imaginative and playful participation that drama education is able to generate purportedly. Not only had they restricted dialogic encounters in the lessons but also the feasibility of identifying children’s creative response emerging from within. These observations led to a shift of the study focus to the method and data of draw-and-tell, which was used to enable children to creatively re-imagine and retell their drama experiences as a concluding reflection. The findings were analysed in three categories, namely Characterization, Re-conceptualization and Transformation to illustrate children’s capacity and techniques of restorying drama experiences with their interest, knowledge, language and culture. The research process as well as the results of the study reveal a complex interplay between teaching, learning and researching affirming that a particular type of creative learning of drama education is not only shaped by a particular form of teaching, but also the research method.
[Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.]

Given the growing awareness of the importance of cultural-specific studies in creativity, the purpose of this study was to develop a rating scale (Creative personality Questionnaire, CPQ) to elicit Hong Kong Chinese preschool teachers' perceptions of creative personality and to determine the factor structure of the CPQ. Items for the CPQ were generated using literature search and interviews. Participants comprised of 564 Chinese preschool teachers. A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed a 20 items, five-factor model (cognitive abilities, discipline, motivation, inventiveness, personal properties) for the CPQ. While most of the personality characteristics in the CPQ were congruent with those suggested in the literature, characteristics relating to well mannered, honest, cautious, and need for recognition in the discipline domain reflects the influence of Chinese culture. The core creative personalities perceived by the Hong Kong Chinese preschool teachers were found to be similar and these characteristics generally aligned with the western views. This study expands the availability of reliable tools for assessing preschool teachers' perception of creative personality and leads to further studies on examining how the teachers' personality affects classroom practices and children's creative learning.
[Copyright © Pergamon Press].

This paper reports the experiences of using a pedagogical framework for creative practices (PFCP) to support preschool teachers in fostering children's creativity in their classrooms. The PFCP includes five pedagogical components: 1) motivation; 2) a divergent process of generating possibilities; 3) a convergent process of selecting ideas; 4) putting ideas into practice; and 5) evaluation. Eighteen teachers from six Hong Kong preschools participated in the study. According to the PFCP, each teacher developed six creative practices and implemented them in their classrooms. Individual semi-structured interviews were used elicit teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the PFCP and the changes of teachers' teaching pedagogy. The observations used as a source of evidence to illustrate teachers' actual teaching behaviours and children's creative performance. The results suggest that the PFCP was perceived as being effective in helping teachers improve their lesson planning and pedagogy. Positive effects such as enhancing teachers' knowledge and skills, infusing creativity into the various learning domains and shifting teaching practices from being strongly teacher centred to being more child centred were documented. This paper discusses the implications and suggests that the PFCP could serve as a starting point for teachers to explore their own creative-practice methods. Finally, the study should lead to further inquiry on effective creative practice teaching strategies.
[Copyright © Pergamon Press].

Along with the increasing global emphasis on creativity, creative teaching has become an issue of concern for a large number of researchers. This study addresses this issue by exploring the belief of Hong Kong teachers on creative teaching. The research results obtained through qualitative approach show that the beliefs of Hong Kong teachers about creative teaching cover process and product dimensions. The informants can be grouped into five categories with reference to their various preferences. The evidence shows that a part of the beliefs of Hong Kong teachers is aligned with ideal theoretical framework advanced by scholars. The deficiency and problems in the belief of teachers in creative teaching are also discussed in this paper.
[Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.]