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This study implemented and evaluated the innovative use of a performance-based assessment platform to support the development of self-regulated learning (SRL) in senior primary students as they completed programming tasks. We embedded SRL support features into a performance-based assessment platform as scaffolding to help the students implement problem-solving strategies. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to evaluate the intervention. The students' perceptions of their SRL skills after working through the programming tasks were measured by a survey of 45 students. The quantitative results suggested that the students benefited from the performance-based assessment platform in developing their SRL skills. A thematic analysis of interview data from 20 students further indicated that the embedded SRL scaffolding and automatic marking function helped them to solve the programming tasks. The results demonstrate that a well-designed performance-based assessment platform with embedded SRL support can be an effective tool for developing students' SRL. The qualitative results further revealed that algorithmic thinking is an aspect of programming for which students need more SRL support.

Artificial intelligence (AI) literacy education for senior secondary students can prepare them for an AI-pervasive future. Although senior secondary students have been targeted, whether they can learn abstract AI concepts, feel empowered to harness AI and understand AI ethical issues is under-researched. We report a 34-h AI literacy programme with three courses for senior secondary students, examining whether they can acquire machine learning, deep learning concepts and discuss related ethical issues in project-based learning. Fifty-nine, fifty-one and thirty-one students completed these three courses, respectively, with pre- and post-course tests, surveys and self-reflective writing measuring their performance. Concepts tests and self-reflective writing showed that the programme improved the senior secondary students' AI concepts and ethical awareness. Programming knowledge was not a prerequisite for conceptual understanding and empowerment. The programme did not alter the students' self-perceived comprehension of ethical principles in any year of study, suggesting that it is a challenge for senior secondary students to fully understand these abstract, higher-level concepts. The curriculum design and content coverage of the programme will be further refined.

An important educational goal for the next generation is the ability to think computationally. Cultivating K-12 students' computational thinking (CT) requires the capacity building of teachers through teacher development programs. However, if students' learning outcomes were not assessed, it is not known whether the enhancement of teacher capacity could impact on students' learning. This study aimed to examine how a teacher development program changed teachers' content knowledge and collaborative engagement, which in turn influenced their students' learning achievement. The participants were 81 teachers and 3226 students from primary schools. We employed multi-level modelling to study the relationships between teacher-level variables and student achievement assessed by a CT concepts test. The teachers' content knowledge and collaborative engagement were significantly enhanced through the program, which in turn had a significant impact on student achievement. Teachers' years of teaching experience, but not their gender or whether they had majored in computer science, could also affect student achievement. The results indicate that a teacher development program can play a significant role in enhancing the teachers' CT content knowledge and collaborative engagement, which can then have a positive effect on student learning.

Emerging research is highlighting the importance of fostering artificial intelligence (AI) literacy among educated citizens of diverse academic backgrounds. However, what to include in such literacy programmes and how to teach literacy is still under-explored. To fill this gap, this study designed and evaluated an AI literacy programme based on a multi-dimensional conceptual framework, which developed participants' conceptual understanding, literacy, empowerment and ethical awareness. It emphasised conceptual building, highlighted project work in application development and initiated teaching ethics through application development. Thirty-six university students with diverse academic backgrounds joined and completed this programme, which included 7 hours on machine learning, 9 hours on deep learning and 14 hours on application development. Together with the project work, the results of the tests, surveys and reflective writings completed before and after these courses indicate that the programme successfully enhanced participants' conceptual understanding, literacy, empowerment and ethical awareness. The programme will be extended to include more participants, such as senior secondary school students and the general public. This study initiates a pathway to lower the barrier to entry for AI literacy and addresses a public need. It can guide and inspire future empirical and design research on fostering AI literacy among educated citizens of diverse backgrounds.

The ability to formulate problems is an important part of computational thinking (CT) development for nurturing creative problem solvers. However, problem formulation is inadequately addressed in primary school education. This study aimed to investigate the problem formulation processes of primary school students. Students from eight winning teams in a primary school CT competition in Hong Kong participated in the study. Focus group interviews were conducted with the students and teachers separately. Data analysis revealed that the students' problem formulation processes could be divided into three stages, namely, the "Find," "Investigate," and "Define" stages. The "Investigate" stage was an essential stage connecting the "Find" and "Define" stages. Interviews showed that support from teachers and parents was necessary for students to gain a positive experience of formulating problems in primary school context. Findings suggest that CT curriculum should be designed to allocate sufficient project time and learning space for students to develop their problem formulation ability. Problem formulation abilities are critical in the development of students' creativity in computational thinking.

The participatory view of learning emphasises students' identity construction. However, identity research in the context of programming education to cultivate students' computational thinking is scarce. In this study, an instrument of computational identity with components of engagement, imagination and affiliation, was developed and validated. Convenience sampling was used to select 1066 senior primary school students studying programming to respond to the instrument, and to a programming empowerment instrument developed previously with components of meaningfulness, self-efficacy and impact. The two instruments' factor structure was confirmed to have acceptable discriminant validity and support gender invariance. There was a positive relationship between programming empowerment and computational identity. Specifically, students' perceived meaningfulness and self-efficacy of programming related to all aspects of computational identity. The perceived impact of programming is related only to the imaginative aspect of computational identity. The establishment of the instrument enables researchers to investigate further factors related to students' computational identity development. The results also indicate that the programming curriculum should be carefully designed so that students can realise the meaning of the activities and foster their programming self-efficacy. This, in turn, is critical to enable these primary school students to participate in and become a member of the digital community.

The current study aims to analyse school leaders' understanding and expectation of, and support for, online teaching and learning during and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA) framework, the authors designed a questionnaire and collected 319 responses from school principals about their views on online teaching and learning. Structural equation modelling revealed that principals' understanding was significantly associated with their expectations and support. Together with a thematic analysis, this study indicated that school principals understood online teaching and learning. The most expected item was students' ownership and access to a suitable device for online learning. Principals were willing to support students' self-regulated learning through online teaching. They appealed for more support for the infrastructure needed to ensure teachers' and students' privacy and security in online teaching and learning. They had suggestions for teacher development to tackle learner diversity in the online mode.

The study presents outcomes of students at a higher education institution in walking through a learning trail guided by a mobile application for enhancing their understanding of academic integrity. A framework which consisted of topic-specific bilingual keywords was proposed to support students to reflect on the key concepts embedded in the learning trail. A total of 61 students from three cohorts were involved in the evaluation. Students' pre-trail and post-trail reflection texts were analysed by bilingual text mining. The results indicated that after the learning trail, the students realised more the importance of the five fundamental values of academic integrity. These results were further confirmed by the summary of students' major topics in pre-trail and post-trail reflection texts, as extracted by the LexRank method. A post-trail questionnaire survey found that students positively perceived the interesting and interactive environment provided in the learning trail. Three future research directions are discussed.

This study aimed at proposing an e-Learning framework in school education. The proposed framework consisted of technology and pedagogy dimensions. The method of computer-aided analysis of learners' reflection text was used to evaluate the pedagogical delivery of the proposed framework. A study involving 33 in-service teachers in a teacher development course was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the pedagogical delivery. The computer-aided analysis of learners' reflection text on "what is e-Learning" before and after the teaching of the course showed that learners deepened their understanding about the technology use and the importance of pedagogy in e-Learning, to consider more the component on theories/models/principles/strategies in pedagogical design and practices, emphasize more the reflection and discussion in learning and teaching activities, and also realize more the possibility of pedagogical decision-making using data collected from online learning. The questionnaire survey and focus group interview with learners also indicated that the pedagogical delivery of the e-Learning framework with the support from the computer-aided analysis of learners' reflection text coupled with hierarchical visualization of analysis results was positively perceived. The research findings contribute pioneering insights into the use of a computer-aided approach for an accurate and efficient evaluation in teacher development courses on e-Learning.

Schools around the globe increasingly realized the importance of technology and its application in the education system. To guarantee a successful educational innovation, schools seek out different parties for valuable opinions. Among them, parents are the important feedback providers, because their attitudes are influential on children's academic performance. Moreover, their involvement and support are considered the key factor that facilitates an effective implementation of programming education at schools. This study aimed at developing and validating an instrument measuring parents' perceptions of programming education among P-12 schools in Hong Kong. We propose that parents' perceptions of programming education is a multidimensional construct which constitutes (a) understanding, (b) support, and (c) expectation. In total, 524 questionnaires were collected from the parents who attended programming workshops and seminars. Exploratory factor analysis shows evidence for the three-dimensional construct. Confirmatory factor analysis reconfirms the measurement structure. Implications of the study are discussed.

This study aims to establish a robust measurement to obtain a comprehensive understanding of perceptions of programming education (POPE) of teacher and principal groups. In this study, the POPE scale contains three dimensions: (a) understanding in programming (UP), (b) support for programming (SP), and (c) expectation of programming (EP). Self-reported questionnaires were administrated among 258 teachers and 229 principals. Multigroup analyses were used among the two groups. The results of measurement invariance tests show that configural and metric invariance are fully supported, and scalar invariance is partially supported, suggesting the factor structures, loadings, and most item intercepts of the POPE scale are equivalent across the groups examined. Implications of the study are discussed.

The study looked into how school partnership generates benefit. It aimed to identify the structures of partnership among collaborating schools and to examine elements that can contribute to sustainable e-Learning development. Six cluster project cases were purposefully selected from an e-Learning pilot scheme in Hong Kong to investigate how school partnership functions in e-Learning implementation through semi-structured focus group interviews. The findings identified five types of partnership structures that were adopted by the six e-Learning cluster projects, namely, a traditional leader-centered team leadership; a fusion of traditional leader-centered and distributed team leadership; a distributed-coordinated team leadership; an intermediate form of distributed-coordinated and distributed-fragmented team leadership; and a duplicated distributed team leadership structure. Elements including mutual benefit, active school engagement with dynamic communication and interaction, reasonable team size, and co-building of online sharing platform for channeling ideas and actions efficiently are critical to keep e-Learning school partnership sustainable.

The interest-driven creator (IDC) theory is being developed as a group endeavor by Asian researchers to articulate a holistic learning design theory for future education in Asia. The theory hypothesizes that students, driven by "interest", can be engaged in the "creation" of knowledge (generating ideas and artifacts). By repeating this creation process in their daily learning routines, they will excel in learning performance, develop twenty-first-century competencies, and form creation "habits". We hope that with such practices in education, our future generations will ultimately become lifelong interest-driven creators. In IDC Theory, there are three "anchored" concepts, namely, interest, creation, and habit. Each anchored concept comprises three "component" concepts which form a "concept loop". For example, the creation loop consists of three component concepts--"imitating", "combining", and "staging". Imitating is concerned with taking in (or inputting) an abundant amount of existing knowledge from the outside world to form one's background knowledge. Combining refers to delivering (or outputting) new ideas or artifacts prolifically by synthesizing existing information encountered in the world and thoughts arising from the students' background knowledge. Staging relates to frequently demonstrating the generated ideas or artifacts to the relevant communities and receiving feedback from these communities to improve the novelty and value of the demonstrated outcomes while gaining social recognition and nurturing positive social emotions. This paper focuses on describing the three components of the creation loop. We provide three case studies to illustrate the creation loop at work, as well as how it intertwines with both the interest and habit loops in supporting students to develop their creation capabilities. In presenting this iteration of the creation concept, an anchored concept in IDC theory, we acknowledge the roles played of imitation, combination, and staging in different learning and education contexts--indeed, there are multiple theories that inform and intersect with it.

Background and Context: Positive youth programming development (PYPD) was conceptualized to measure various positive qualities of students in programming education. Objective: This study aimed to develop a valid PYPD instrument in the pilot before exploring students' positive qualities in two follow-up studies. Method: A multi-study design was adopted with questionnaires distributed among university students enrolled in programming courses. In pilot study, the PYPD instrument was developed and validated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Study 1 used independent T-tests to explore potential factors that were predictive of students' PYPD differences. Study 2 conducted paired T-tests to examine students' PYPD improvement. Findings: Results supported validity of the PYPD instrument; provided evidence that intrinsic motivation is particularly crucial for PYPD differences; and showed positive improvement of students' PYPD. Implications: Our findings shed light on existing literature that programming education can play an importantly role if educators want to nurture positive qualities in students.

In response to the call from the founders of the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory, this study aimed to explore the relationship of the interest loop with creativity in the context of robotics education. Specifically, we designed a programmable robotics course for primary school students. We attempted to explore in detail how interest loop, i.e., triggering interest, immersing interest, and extending interest, exerts influences on students' robotics creation. Eight hundred one online questionnaires were collected from students who participated in our designed programmable robotics activities. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was first used for validation of each study variable, and results suggested a good fit of the study variables in terms of convergent and discriminant validity. Then, structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted for examining the potential relationships between them, and results indicated significant and positive paths from triggering interest to immersing interest, and from immersing interest to extending interest, suggesting the valid theoretical proposition of interest loop of IDC theory. In addition, immersing interest is positively related to robotics creation, which in turn increases the chance of extending interest. Our findings suggested the importance of raising students' interest in robotics learning such that young students can become life-long interest-driven creators. Implications of the study were discussed at the end of the paper.

This study proposed frameworks for designing inquiry approaches with multimedia in science e-textbooks through exploring the extent and features of inquiry approaches with science topics in a digital textbook. Results revealed that the experiential, evidence-based and predict-observe-explain approaches are designed in 70% of the science topics. Such design differs by subject (earth science, biology, or physics). Through analyzing concrete examples, frameworks are consolidated to demonstrate how these approaches involve resources such as dialogue cartoons, animations, or simulations to assist students' inquiry and understanding of science phenomena. This study has implications for science e-textbook design and inquiry-based teaching in primary schools.