This study examined whether authoritarian parenting, children's negative emotionality and negative coping strategies independently or jointly predict children's aggressive behaviour at school. Participants included the teachers and mothers of 185 Hong Kong resident Chinese children (90 girls and 95 boys), aged 6-8. Teachers rated the children's aggressive behaviour at school, and mothers reported how often they adopted an authoritarian parenting style and rated the children's negative emotionality and coping strategies. A model predicting children's aggressive behaviour with maternal authoritarian parenting and children's negative emotionality affecting children's aggressive behaviour at school through the mediating effect of children's negative coping strategies was examined. Mother's adoption of authoritarian parenting was not related to their perception of the children's negative emotionality. Neither authoritarian parenting nor negative emotionality alone predicted children's aggressive behaviour at school. The mediation model was supported. The results imply that school personnel should take children's emotionality into consideration when offering training programmes on emotion coping strategies for children.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430902981447]

This study investigates the transition from kindergarten to primary school through the experiences of the teachers, parents and children involved. Emphasis is given to the transitional activities participated in by the stakeholders and the effectiveness of these activities. These experiences of children's transition to school will inform further research into the design of effective transition programmes in the local context. The means of investigation in this study include questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations. The results show that the teachers and parents generally believed that the children performed quite well academically, although the primary school teachers reported that they were average in discipline. The findings from both the questionnaires and the interviews show that most of the respondents agreed that strong connections between kindergarten, primary school and parents could facilitate a smoother transition to school. However, in reality, both kindergarten and primary school teachers showed ignorance of each other's teaching practices and curriculum.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430802586130]

This study describes the validation and interpretation of the Parents' Attributions and Perception Questionnaire (PAPQ) using confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch modelling to report both the construct validity and category structure of the scales in the questionnaire. The PAPQ was developed to reflect the proposal that parents mediate the relationship between their children's social and psychological development, and their academic achievement, within the context of Hong Kong. The questionnaire consists of four subscales that reflect different interactions between parents and their children in relation to their children's academic-related activities, including a Parental Attributions Scale, Parental Beliefs of Working Memory Scale, Parental Home and School Involvement Scale, and Parental Academic Expectations Scale. These subscales were supplemented by a fifth subscale that describes parents' socio-economic background. The PAPQ was administered to 215 parents from four schools in Hong Kong. Results showed that the four subscales of the PAPQ are valid and reliable unidimensional measures of constructs related to parental role in the academic achievement of their children, thereby enabling future research to directly test Vygotsky's hypothesis.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2010.496900]

This research attempts to explore the antecedents of teacher behavior in communicating with parents, and to develop and test a model of teacher-parent communication in the context of Hong Kong primary schools.
The investigation comprised four parts. The first part was the evolving of a conceptual framework in predicting teacher behavior in communicating with parents. The proposed framework made important reference to concepts in the theory of planned behavior, but adopted neither the majority of its constructs nor the second-order structure of attitude- belief. It was hypothesized that teacher behavior was mainly determined by teacher intention, and teacher intention was subsequently determined by four components of teacher beliefs: namely role beliefs, normative beliefs, efficacy beliefs and context beliefs. Relevant teacher beliefs were identified and incorporated into the four components.
The second part of the study (Study One) explored the feasibility of the proposed framework with a small sample. Instruments for measuring various teacher variables were developed. The proposed model was basically supported by path analysis. This initial study was encouraging and justified the use of a more powerful tool of structural equation modeling, which could test simultaneously the whole system of variables.
The third part of the study (Study Two - Part One) was the first section of the main study involving 1918 teachers from primary schools. It comprised the developing of a total of thirteen measurement models of teacher beliefs and intention to be used in the modified framework of study. Satisfactory goodness-of-fit indices were obtained for all resulting instruments.
The last part of the study (Study Two - Part Two) involved the developing and testing of the structural model for predicting teacher communication behavior. A model generation approach was adopted. Altogether, three paths and six correlations were added to the hypothesized initial model.