Life education, originating in the West, has been an increasingly important source of moral and values education in the Greater China region. Life education, to some extent, is linked with different kinds of values education that encompasses moral and citizenship education, environmental education as well as religious and spiritual education. In the 21st century, life education could also be complementary to positive education that is related to the development of positive (life) values and the pursuit of well-being. Life education also echoes with health education under the impact of COVID-19 along with life and planning education including life-long learning perspectives. This chapter explores the theoretical and practical connections between life education, positive education and other values education and proposes an integrated and holistic approach to curriculum development for the context of Hong Kong. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Kerry J. Kennedy, Margarita Pavlova and John Chi-Kin Lee; individual chapters, the contributors.

系統功能語言學認為語言具有其系統和功能，語文教學應該使學生掌握語言的系統，並在互動中學習如何恰當地使用語言。本文通過實證研究分析59位香港非華語學生的真實語料，結合量化數據和質性分析，探討第二語言學習者的實用中文寫作表現。研究發現，非華語學生整體實用文寫作能力較弱，尤其在語旨、語式、連接、文法等層面表現最弱；在語境內容方面普遍文類知識不足，無法掌握特定文類的寫作目的和結構，文步和層次不完整，亦缺少語境的概念；在表述方式層面詞匯量有限；在文法呈現方面受到英文文法影響，體現了語言的負遷移現象。本研究亦通過基於系統功能語言學發展出的寫作評估標準，為寫作評量提供新的視角，使教師和研究者能更細緻地了解非華語學生的寫作難點和學習需求，掌握學生到底是在語境內容、表述方式或文法呈現當中的十四個層面有甚麼不足之處，才能進一步發展有針對性的教學設計，通過相應策略提升第二語言學習者的寫作能力。Systemic functional linguistics emphasizes on the system and functions of language, and it suggests that language education should help students learn the system of language and how to apply it in communication appropriately. This empirical research analyzed the authentic materials of 59 non-Chinese speaking (NCS) students through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The research findings discovered the weak performance of NCS students in practical writing, especially in the aspects of tenor, mode, conjunction, and grammar. Other problems included the insufficiency in the genre knowledge, inability to understand the writing purpose and structure of certain genre, incomplete steps and phases, lack of the concept of context, limited vocabulary, and the language form affected by English grammar as the result of negative transfer in second language. This research not only studied their practical writing performance but also introduced a new scoring scheme of Chinese writing developed based on systemic functional linguistics. Therefore, teachers and researchers can understand students' writing difficulties and learning needs from the perspectives of context, discourse, grammar and presentation, and develop specific teaching design or relevant strategies to improve the writing ability of second language learners. Copyright © 2021 香港中文大學香港教育研究所.

Art classrooms and museums are places where teachers and students talk about artworks. However, there is a lack of empirical research into dialogue—the most basic component of classroom teaching and the most used education strategy in museums. I investigated the development and experimentation of a dialogue-and-questioning framework for art classrooms and museums. I conducted a design-based research study with seven primary schoolteachers and 187 6th-grade students in Hong Kong. I found that the total number of questions asked by the teacher participants increased significantly. Teachers’ performance, when asking personal connection, observation, interpretation, and evaluation questions, also improved significantly. They became more conscious of relating artworks to the students in a personal way and developed a practice that fostered a more comprehensive understanding of artworks. Student participants began to approach artworks from different perspectives and engaged in more in-depth examinations. Copyright © 2022 National Art Education Association.

This study explored whether children's second language (L2) vocabulary, syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension contributed to the growth of each other. A total of 184 Chinese primary school children (91 girls) aged 8–10 years old in Hong Kong participated in the pre-test of this study. Among them, 88 were in Grade 3 and 96 were in Grade 4. One year later, 178 of these children also participated in the post-test. These children learned English as an L2 at school. They completed a series of English language tasks. The results from a cross-lagged panel model show that vocabulary predicted the growth of syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Syntactic awareness predicted the growth of vocabulary and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension facilitated the growth of vocabulary, and it also predicted the growth of syntactic awareness in Grade 4 students but not in Grade 3 students. Implications for teaching children an L2 are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Research has demonstrated the positive impact of active learning on students’ learning outcomes, particularly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. However, few studies have explored the impact of active learning via problem-based collaborative games in large mathematics classes in the context of Asian tertiary education. This study assesses the effects of active learning on students’ learning outcomes using class test scores and the calculus concept inventory (CCI) to test the conceptual understanding of the basic principles of differential calculus, in a first year calculus course in Hong Kong. Three hypotheses were tested to determine the effects of game-based collaborative learning on learning mathematics among students. Active learning through a problem-based collaborative learning methodology was employed, using Kahoot!, a game-based learning platform. Results supported all three hypotheses, demonstrating a statistically significant increase in students’ conceptual understanding and examination performance, based upon their individual perceptions of active engagement and time spent in active learning. Our results indicated that active learning “levels the playing field”, in the sense that students with less pre-requisite background knowledge, using a problem-based collaborative learning methodology, were relatively more inclined to catch up or even exceed the performance of students with a stronger prerequisite background knowledge, at the end of the course. Copyright © 2019 by the authors.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching and learning activities had to be conducted fully online. To sustain quality education, teachers could use open educational resources (OERs) available in the public domain to make online mathematics teaching more effective and interactive. However, we currently know little about the use of OERs in primary school settings. Therefore, this study seeks to understand their school policies and guidelines on and teachers’ experience of using OERs during the pandemic. Our overarching goal is to provide recommendations on the future development and use of OERs in the context of primary school mathematics education. We employed a qualitative approach and interviewed 13 mathematics teachers from different primary schools. Our findings suggest that teachers tended to rely on OERs more during the pandemic than before. They used OERs to introduce mathematics and to facilitate class interactions in online lessons. However, not all schools had policies and guidelines on the use of OERs in place. Some teachers also encountered challenges when using OERs, such as finding that the resources were unsuitable for school contexts and lower primary school students. Based on the findings, we discuss some possible strategies for the improvement, such as ensuring the suitability of OERs, through developer–teacher collaborations. Copyright © 2022 by the authors.

Art educators claim that Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) can facilitate students' critical thinking skills and creativity. This article explores a study conducted in Hong Kong senior secondary schools that analysed the extent to which VCAE promotes creativity and critical thinking skills using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The discussion identifies the ways that VCAE students made connections between their everyday life experiences, social lives, and culture and in the process developed their creativity and critical thinking skills. Copyright © 2021 Art Education Australia.

This article reports on the results of a qualitative interpretive pilot study investigating the role of comic strips on tertiary ESP learners’ motivation and discipline-specific language learning. The participants were 10 third-year students enrolled in two discipline-specific English courses at a university in Hong Kong. The results show that integrating multimodality through comic strips helped to transform the traditional delivery of instruction and also motivated and facilitated learners’ understanding of discipline-specific concepts and vocabulary. Participants also indicated that technology contributed to more student agency and fostered language creativity as they expended more effort in their learning. The findings suggest the need for ESP teachers to explore technology and integrate creativity and multimodality in the delivery of discipline-specific course content. Copyright © 2021 Asian ESP Journal.

In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) regularly assesses the quality of services provided by publicly subsidized kindergartens to children aged 3 to 6. Quality Review (QR) reports are written by government officials and published on the EDB's website. This study analyzes the feedback pertaining to Arts and Creativity to better understand the role this learning area plays in Hong Kong kindergartens. Lexical and content analyses were applied on 164 QR reports published between 2017 and 2020. Findings showed that: (1) the role of Arts and Creativity in the QR reports is relatively minor, which suggests that this learning area is somewhat secondary in Hong Kong kindergartens; (2) presence of the various art forms differs significantly, with Music and Visual Arts being more frequent than Drama and especially Dance; and (3) classroom activities seem to be teacher-centered, product-oriented, and reproductive. Findings suggest that the Arts and Creativity pedagogies enacted in Hong Kong kindergartens are not fully consistent with the official kindergarten Curriculum Guide, which draws on a Western conceptualization of creativity in the arts. We argue that this curriculum/practice gap reveals the need for local stakeholders to embrace a "glocalization" paradigm. Limitations, future research, and implications are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Jerry Yeung et al.

Teaching students how to code in K-12 classrooms is considered as one of the major keys to promoting engineering education in the future, which can potentially enhance the competency and computational skills of students to adhere better learning outcomes in higher education. The success of promoting coding education or integrating it into school curriculum depends on the perceptions of teachers and headmasters in schools, and how well they believe on coding education and prepare for the innovative teaching and learning. In this exploratory research study, it reports the results of a large-scale quantitative questionnaire surveying 42 primary and secondary schools (n = 42) in Hong Kong, where computer programming has not been regulated as a compulsory course in K-12 curriculum. The questionnaire aims to investigate the school belief on coding education and their practical challenges while integrating it into their regular school curriculum. Our results show that there is a trend in the local schools promoting coding education with positive perceptions on teaching and learning. However, teaching challenges are also mentioned in the survey waiting for solutions, such as lack of teachers training and unified curriculum. Therefore, the empirical experiences of these schools have set forth the future research direction in design and implementation of coding education in K-12 classrooms not only in Hong Kong but also in the globe. Copyright © 2015 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.