There has been a clear shift in higher education to prepare and empower the current students for a future quite different and more complex than that faced by previous generations. In particular, it is expected that they will possess comprehensive abilities to deal with challenges arising from new employment demands and beyond. While liberal arts education has a long history in the West, it has been increasingly implemented more recently in East Asia as one response to the need for educational reform. The research reported here is an empirical study of how liberal arts education has affected individuals from two institutions with distinctive interpretations of "liberal arts education" - University N, the first Sino-foreign joint university in mainland China, and University L, the only public liberal arts university in Hong Kong. Drawing on Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, this study illustrates the interplay and balance among students' practical concerns, their sense of social obligation fostered through liberal arts education elements and the wider social structure. Semi-structured interviews with senior students, fresh graduates, and educators were conducted to gather in-depth primary data. These reveal that, by providing interdisciplinary knowledge and transferable skill sets, a liberal arts education experience does enhance individuals' personal agency and intellectual competencies in a professional context - they are trained to become independent thinkers and learners. Moreover, the "humanistic" aspect of liberal arts is also relevant: having engaged in various activities and programs, students in both universities are encouraged to care, cooperate, and make positive differences in their increasingly interconnected communities. Copyright ©2024 Eurasian Society of Educational Research.

Parents play a crucial role in facilitating their children's participation in extracurricular music activities. Guided by the framework of concerted cultivation, this survey study conducted with Hong Kong parents investigates (1) the types of extracurricular music activities in which their three- to eight-year-old children participate, (2) the importance parents attribute to music education and its correlation with key demographic factors, and (3) the predictive relationship between the importance parents attribute to music education and their children's music participation. A self-designed survey was completed by 430 parents. Descriptive statistics, correlation, and binary logistic regression were conducted. Children's participation rate in extracurricular music activities was found to be low. While younger children tended to engage in collaborative and unstructured activities, older children participated more in individual and guided activities. The importance attributed by parents to music education was relatively high and correlated with their background and family demographics. The higher the parents rated the importance of music education, the more likely they were to have signed up or intended to sign up their children for music activities. This study offers insights into children's extracurricular music participation, highlights parental roles in children's music education, and underscores the necessity of educating parents about the importance of music education. Copyright ©2025 MDPI.

A key pedagogical goal in any classroom is to engage students in learning. This study examines how an English-Medium-Instruction (EMI) teacher employs available resources to engage his students in the classroom for promoting participation, keeping the lesson moving forward and meeting the pedagogical goals. The data for this study is based on a intensive fieldwork in an EMI secondary history classroom in Hong Kong. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is deployed to analyse the classroom interactional data. The classroom analysis is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The study's crucial theoretical contribution is that it broadens our comprehension of an EMI classroom as an integrated translanguaging space, which may involve various fluid and mobile translanguaging sub-spaces. This paper aims to illustrate the process of engaging students affords the teacher to create different translanguaging sub-spaces at a whole-class level and at an individual level. It is argued that creating these translanguaging sub-spaces requires the teacher to mobilise available resources for catering for the different needs of all students, which promotes interaction and inclusion in the classrooms. Copyright ©2025 Routledge.

In the past, visual arts education in Hong Kong was not considered an important area of early childhood education. While the Hong Kong kindergarten curriculum has recently been updated to encourage creativity, there remains a lack of adequate visual arts education for young children. This deficiency stems from the fact that the visual arts receive minimal attention within Hong Kong teacher education programs. Little research has been conducted on how visual arts education is actually delivered in local kindergarten classrooms in Hong Kong and what kinds of artistic knowledge and skills kindergarten teachers need. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate kindergarten teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in early visual arts education (EVAE) and to identify the challenges they faced in teaching visual arts to children. The study surveyed 342 in-service kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong and conducted individual interviews with 12 participants. The findings revealed that Hong Kong kindergarten teachers generally performed well in terms of their pedagogical content knowledge, but they lacked content knowledge in various forms of early visual arts (EVA) and faced challenges in teaching visual arts effectively. This study has the potential to change how early childhood visual arts teaching is conceptualized and taught in Hong Kong and other Asian regions. Copyright ©2025 Springer.

Differentiated instruction (DI), an educational philosophy that aims to cater for learner diversity, has been advocated by scholars and teachers over the past two decades. Nevertheless, little is known about how teachers practise DI in online teaching, particularly in the context of English language teaching during the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To fill this gap, this single participant case study aimed to delineate concrete ways of implementing DI during an online English writing lesson for English as a second language (ESL) learners in a Hong Kong primary school. To provide a thick description, multiple sources of data were extracted from a rich data pool of a two‐year longitudinal teacher professional development project which included lesson recordings, post‐lesson debriefing meeting recordings, and student work. The findings suggested that the case teacher employed various DI strategies (i.e., providing chances for all student participation, using multisensory pedagogical designs, using information technology) to cater for learner diversity during online English teaching. It is argued that despite the potential challenges, it could be feasible and manageable to employ some DI strategies to address learner diversity during online English teaching. This study contributes to DI theory and practice by deepening our understanding of implementing DI in the context of online English teaching and providing a valuable reference for educational practitioners. It also advances our knowledge of how technology could be leveraged to support DI implementation. Copyright ©2024 Wiley.

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) allows students to mobilize a wide range of multimodal resources to make meaning. While studies in DMC tended to focus on language-learning contexts, few of them examine its use in content-based courses whereby students are proficient L2 users expected to demonstrate understanding of abstract concepts using DMC. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with English-major students who attended a writing course in an English-medium instruction university in Hong Kong, the study investigated how the students' view of DMC was transformed after exposure to DMC pedagogy. The study findings suggest that students developed an increased awareness of the affordances and constraints of (new media) writing, and they strategically bring in and bridge 'in-class' and 'out-of-class' digital practices. Students also reported on the opportunities and challenges of DMC pedagogy through reflecting on their DMC experiences. The study proposes suggestions for implementing DMC in diverse teaching and learning contexts. Copyright ©2024 Oxford University Press.

現存識字教學研究主要旨在提出教學方法，而本文的旨趣則在於基礎觀念的論述。本文先概述變易學習理論，繼而討論何謂識字教學，並提出變易理論指導下的識字是怎樣的。本文接着，報告筆者一項研究計劃的成果，計劃以變易理論的識字作為資料分析的工具。計劃所欲探究的是，幼稚園幼兒在日常自然情境下，在認字活動中會呈現哪些類型的學習錯誤？計劃共招募到 142 位在職教師協助觀察幼兒的日常表現。最終收集到的學習錯誤共 758 個，呈現為四個類型：（一）混淆符號的功能；（二）混淆符號；（三）混淆字的其他符號；（四）混淆字符號以外的其他方面。筆者會剖析變易理論的識字，與先前文獻的結果有何異同，以及提出對教學實踐的啟示。 Copyright © 2024 香港教育大學.

Science education researchers argue for encouraging multilingual students’ use of different linguistic and multimodal resources to make meaning of scientific practices. However, multilingual students need to internalize beliefs that they can freely draw on these asset forms of resources, so that they can consistently adopt sustainable multilingual and multimodal practices. Complementing the recent research efforts on measuring teachers’ beliefs about epistemic use of languages in science, we reported a study that develop and validate a Likert-scale instrument that measures students’ beliefs about equitable and epistemic use of languages in learning science. The instrument was initially piloted to 191 junior secondary students, and then was revised and administered to 981 junior secondary students in Hong Kong. Supported by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the instrument inherited four dimensions: beliefs about constitutive role of language in scientific practices, beliefs about multiple modalities in science learning, heteroglossic beliefs about language use in learning science and inclusive beliefs about use of multiple languages in collaborative discussion. The instrument inherited satisfactory content and construct validity, while we also provided evidence that such an instrument was sensitive to different linguistic contexts. Hence, we argue that the instrument can potentially measure the outcome of translanguaging-based science education intervention and comparing students’ beliefs under a range of linguistic contexts worldwide. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).

This study explores the integration of drone technology into STEM education through the development and evaluation of the Drone Technology Enabled STEM Curriculum (DTESC). Grounded in “dronagogy”, a pedagogical framework that utilizes drones to enhance learning, DTESC effectively incorporates drone technology within science, mathematics, technology, and the humanities. The curriculum is structured to progress from multidisciplinary exploration to interdisciplinary integration, ultimately culminating in transdisciplinary applications. Sixteen Grade 9–10 students from a secondary school in Hong Kong participated in the study, engaging in activities such as designing drone-assisted water sampling systems and formulating entrepreneurial proposals for future applications. Employing mixed research methods, the study assessed the curriculum’s impact across cognitive, psychomotor, and affective learning domains. Results indicated high levels of student engagement and satisfaction, alongside significant improvements in psychomotor and affective skills. However, enhancements in cognitive learning outcomes, particularly in mathematics and programming, are necessary. This research offers valuable insights into the implementation of dronagogy to foster cross-disciplinary STEM education. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s).