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This study aims to reveal features of student talk over a sequence of consecutive mathematics lessons in a large-size class in mainland China. By examining the time allocation for student talk and the number of Chinese characters spoken by the students, this study finds that, in some of the lessons observed, student talk added up to a longer duration and included a larger number of Chinese characters than teacher talk. But individual students were observed to have unequal opportunities to participate in public talk and there is a large gap regarding the number of Chinese characters that an individual student could speak in public. Each individual student's accountability to talk was recorded to be less diverse in public presentation than in non-presentation contexts (e.g., answering teacher questions). This study suggests that a unit of consecutive lessons can help a clearer and more comprehensive observation and analysis of student talk.

Interactive problem solving and learning are priorities in contemporary education, but these complex processes have proved difficult to research. This project addresses the question "How do we optimise social interaction for the promotion of learning in a mathematics classroom?" Employing the logic of multi-theoretic research design, this project uses the newly built Science of Learning Research Classroom (ARC-SR120300015) at The University of Melbourne and equivalent facilities in China to investigate classroom learning and social interactions, focusing on collaborative small group problem solving as a way to make the social aspects of learning visible. In Australia and China, intact classes of local year 7 students with their usual teacher will be brought into the research classroom facilities with built-in video cameras and audio recording equipment to participate in purposefully designed activities in mathematics. The students will undertake a sequence of tasks in the social units of individual, pair, small group (typically four students) and whole class. The conditions for student collaborative problem solving and learning will be manipulated so that student and teacher contributions to that learning process can be distinguished. Parallel and comparative analyses will identify culture-specific interactive patterns and provide the basis for hypotheses about the learning characteristics underlying collaborative problem solving performance documented in the research classrooms in each country. The ultimate goals of the project are to generate, develop and test more sophisticated hypotheses for the optimisation of social interaction in the mathematics classroom in the interest of improving learning and, particularly, student collaborative problem solving.

The major premise of this project is that teachers learn from the act of teaching a lesson. Rather than asking "What must a teacher already know in order to practice effectively?", this project asks "What might a teacher learn through their activities in the classroom and how might this learning be optimised?" In this project, controlled conditions are created utilising purposefully designed and trialled lesson plans to investigate the process of teacher knowledge construction, with teacher selective attention proposed as a key mediating variable. In order to investigate teacher learning through classroom practice, the project addresses the following questions: To what classroom objects, actions and events do teachers attend and with what consequence for their learning? Do teachers in different countries attend to different classroom events and consequently derive different learning benefits from teaching a lesson? This international project combines focused case studies with an online survey of mathematics teachers' selective attention and consequent learning in Australia, China and Germany. Data include the teacher's adaptation of a pre-designed lesson, the teacher's actions during the lesson, the teacher's reflective thoughts about the lesson and, most importantly, the consequences for the planning and delivery of a second lesson. The combination of fine-grained, culturally situated case studies and large-scale online survey provides mutually informing benefits from each research approach. The research design, so constituted, offers the means to a new and scalable vision of teacher learning and its promotion.

Enactment of scientific inquiry in classroom has attracted a great attention of science educators around the world. In this study, we examined two competent teachers' (one Grade 9 chemistry teacher and one Grade 4 science teacher) enactment of scientific inquiry in selected teaching units to reveal the characteristics of enacted inquiry at different grade levels by analyzing lesson sequence videos. The coding schemes for enacted inquiry consist of ontological properties and instructional practices. Pre-topic and post-topic teacher interviews and the two teachers' responses to a questionnaire were adopted to identify the factors influencing teacher's enactment. The results indicate that the two case teachers' enactment involved a range of inquiry activities. The enacted inquiry at fourth-grade level covered all the inquiry elements, tending to engage students in the whole procedure of inquiry. The ninth-grade chemistry class placed emphasis on the elements "making plans" to solve problems in authentic context. Important factors influencing the enactment include teacher's understanding about scientific inquiry, textbooks, assessment, students and resource. Implications for inquiry enactment and instruction improvement have been provided.

The article focuses on several street protests staged in Hong Kong since its handover to China in 1997, including a rally held by students against a government attempt to introduce national education into the school curriculum and the Umbrella Movement which began on September 28, 2014.

Although China’s high-speed railway (HSR) is maturing after more than ten years of construction and development, the load factor and revenue of HSR could still be improved by optimizing the ticket fare structure. Different from the present unitary and changeless fare structure, this paper explores the application of multigrade fares to China’s HSR. On the premise that only one fare grade can be offered for each origin-destination (O-D) at the same time, this paper addresses the questions of how to adjust ticket price over time to maximize the revenue. First, on the basis of piecewise pricing strategy, a ticket fare optimization model is built, which could be transformed to convex program to be solved. Then, based on the analysis of passenger arrival regularity using historical ticket data of Beijing-Shanghai HSR line, several experiments are performed using the method proposed in the paper to explore the properties of the optimal multigrade fare scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese students constitute the most rapidly growing international cohort of students enrolled in many Western tertiary settings, and it is important to understand more about their preparation for engaging with commonly used teaching approaches such as groupwork. This study investigated their attitudes and experience of groupwork while enrolled at a large Chinese university. Semi-structured and video-stimulated recall interview data were collected from 16 third-year Finance students over a 5-week field study. Results showed that this group of Chinese students experienced more out-of-class than in-class groupwork activities. These out-of-class groupwork sessions fell into three categories: (1) student initiated, (2) student league initiated and (3) teacher initiated. Students identified both individual and collective benefits from groupwork, highlighting that Chinese students value groupwork and actively seek to engage with it in the Chinese tertiary context. This study contributes to the understanding of Chinese students' group practices in Chinese tertiary settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that discursive practice in classrooms plays a key role in student learning of mathematics. This study extends a previous study on spoken mathematics (Clarke and Xu in ZDM Int J Math Educ 40(6):963-981, ) and seeks to compare the discursive practices in classrooms from Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo with a particular focus on meta-discursive rules (Sfard in Educ Stud Math 46:13-57, ; Sfard in Thinking as communicating: human development, the growth of discourses, and mathematizing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ) that regulate exchanges between the teacher and students. The analysis centres on the events when the topic of 'linear equations' was introduced. The similarities and differences of the three classrooms suggest that while the shared macrocultural values and beliefs may frame the social activity of the classrooms in similar ways, the meta-discursive rules of classroom microculture determine the opportunities for student learning in mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an overview of British responses to Chinese music in the 18th century, and discusses in depth an informal musical performance by a Chinese visitor to London, not previously remarked upon in musicological literature. Taking place in 1756, this may have been the earliest Chinese musical performance in the West. The imbalance between the European response to Chinese visual and musical cultures is explored, and an examination of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is used to argue that even in musical contexts it is Chinese visual culture, rather than musical culture, which was most prominent. British responses to Chinese music are distinguished from those of continental Europe, on which they are nevertheless shown largely to depend at least until the period of Lord Macartney’s embassy to China in 1793. A transcription of one of the pieces of music played by the Chinese visitor (which was published in a contemporary magazine account of the event as ‘A Chinese Air’) is discussed, and the Chinese performer is identified as ‘Loum Kiqua’ with the aid of other documentation of the period. A portrait of Loum Kiqua by Dominic Serres—known today only through a print by Thomas Burford—is considered. Broader issues of Chinese–Western cross-cultural musical interchange are raised with reference to the specific example of ‘The Chinese Air’, and the possibility is also considered that Loum Kiqua met Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith during his stay in London, perhaps even providing one of the inspirations for the latter’s The Citizen of the World, a satire on British society presented as written by a Chinese visitor. Amongst Western commentators on Chinese music considered are Gaspar da Cruz, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Joseph-Marie Amiot, John Barrow, Johann Christian Hüttner and Charles Burney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research reported in this paper examined spoken mathematics in particular well-taught classrooms in Australia, China (both Shanghai and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea and the USA from the perspective of the distribution of responsibility for knowledge generation in order to identify similarities and differences in classroom practice and the implicit pedagogical principles that underlie those practices. The methodology of the Learner's Perspective Study documented the voicing of mathematical ideas in public discussion and in teacher-student conversations and the relative priority accorded by different teachers to student oral contributions to classroom activity. Significant differences were identified among the classrooms studied, challenging simplistic characterisations of 'the Asian classroom' as enacting a single pedagogy, and suggesting that, irrespective of cultural similarities, local pedagogies reflect very different assumptions about learning and instruction. We have employed spoken mathematical terms as a form of surrogate variable, possibly indicative of the location of the agency for knowledge generation in the various classrooms studied (but also of interest in itself). The analysis distinguished one classroom from another on the basis of "public oral interactivity" (the number of utterances in whole class and teacher-student interactions in each lesson) and "mathematical orality" (the frequency of occurrence of key mathematical terms in each lesson). Classrooms characterized by high public oral interactivity were not necessarily sites of high mathematical orality. In particular, the results suggest that one characteristic that might be identified with a national norm of practice could be the level of mathematical orality: relatively high mathematical orality characterising the mathematics classes in Shanghai with some consistency, while lessons studied in Seoul and Hong Kong consistently involved much less frequent spoken mathematical terms. The relative contributions of teacher and students to this spoken mathematics provided an indication of how the responsibility for knowledge generation was shared between teacher and student in those classrooms. Specific analysis of the patterns of interaction by which key mathematical terms were introduced or solicited revealed significant differences. It is suggested that the empirical investigation of mathematical orality and its likely connection to the distribution of the responsibility for knowledge generation and to student learning ourcomes are central to the development of any theory of mathematics instruction and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Portugal's return of Macau to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 and the process of cultural transition that followed that event. The reclamation and commodification of space in Macau is explored, as are the territory's attempts to reconnect with China by rebuilding its infrastructure. A preoccupation with the spectacular, particularly in Macau's gaming industry, is also examined.

In the period since Hong Kong's 1997 return to China there has been a great deal of new construction and demolition in the city, and widespread public protest against these changes has been seen. Although superficially this contestation might seem to be about the narrowly defined issue of 'conservation', in fact broader issues concerning cultural identity, collective memory, and the city's future are at stake. This discursive battle concerning Hong Kong's postcolonial built environment is the topic of the present photo essay, which draws on an historical archive of documentary images created by the author in the period from 1994 to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses interactions between Chinese and American art in China and the United States. Mark Tobey, an artist, was a pioneer in investigating the Asian artistic heritage as a resource for Western modernist art, and his work had a great influence on the development of abstraction that occurred in American painting after the Second World War. When Tobey discussed his artistic development he emphasized the importance of his study of Chinese brushwork, undertaken in Seattle with a Chinese friend, in liberating him from bondage to the Renaissance heritage and permitting him to discover the use of dynamic lines that had become the hallmark of his style. Teng Baiye, an artist, played a significant role in the development of sculpture in China.

Investigates the developments in Chinese art. Factors which encouraged the growth of Western interest in Chinese art; Evaluation of several Chinese artists and their works; Chinese art in Hong Kong.

The article profiles the art scene in Hong Kong, China, which began in the 1980s and focused on local identity. The impact of the handover of Hong Kong from British rule to Chinese rule is addressed. The Para/Site gallery in Hong Kong is discussed as a gallery which focuses on the work of these artists. Installations and photography of Hong Kong artists including Kith Tsang, Sara Wong, and Warren Leung that appeared there are addressed.

The article provides a philosophical debate between the ideas of tradition and modernity, focusing on the way in which they are represented in the art of Hong Kong, China. The author includes a discussion of the focus on the tradition of Chinese ink painting, and the attempt by modern Chinese artists to include Abstract Expressionism and European gesturalism in their work. Artists discussed include Lui Shou-kwan, Wucius Wong, and Ng Yiu-chung.