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Developing students' self-regulated learning (SRL) is crucial for nurturing the life-long learners needed in modern and future society. This study adopted structural equation modelling to explore the relationships among self-regulatory climate, group regulation in project-based learning (PBL) and individual regulatory ability. The results indicate that (i) group regulation has a significant positive effect on SRL ability; (ii) self-regulatory climate (i.e. academic emphasis and teacher trust in students) have significant positive effects on both group regulation and SRL ability; and (iii) student trust in teachers has a negative effect on group regulation and a positive effect on SRL ability. A combination of three approaches (i.e., the explicit, implicit and immersion) is recommended to generate convergent forces to efficiently cultivate self-regulatory learners.

This article reports on a qualitative study investigating the teaching experiences of ESL teachers of ethnic minority students from South Asian countries. Eight ESL teachers from two secondary schools in Hong Kong were interviewed. Informed by the concept of neoliberal governmentality, this study explores the shaping effect of neoliberal education on these teachers' professional development, their negotiation with the current examination-oriented educational policy, and the overall neoliberal discourse in education. The teachers were found to be ambivalent in their contradictory positions regarding whether to encourage or prohibit the use of heritage languages in English learning, whether to conform to the curriculum or develop new materials and try out new ways, and how to unravel social responsibility for ethnic minority groups' development. This study has implications for the importance of awareness of the impact of macro-level neoliberalism on micro-level educational practices among teachers, principals, and policy makers, and for the necessity of developing teacher education programmes to prepare teachers with a particular concern about the well-being of children (especially those in underprivileged communities), and enable them to think critically about scripted curriculum packages and to work within more diverse and challenging contexts.

Despite the metaverse having been increasingly designed, developed, and applied to education, critical issues regarding the lack of truly immersive learning environments, custom tools, clear instructional design, and inconvenience of using the platform, and ethics and privacy concerns exist. This study aimed to design and develop a 3-D metaverse platform, "Learningverse" to support teaching, social, and cognitive presences. Learningverse combines the key features of an immersive learning environment with avatars that mirror the real users, rich social interactions among avatars, custom tools that allow users to construct or create their own artefacts, and a low threshold for users to join the metaverse on an ordinary computer with a webcam and without having to wear a VR headset. A usability test was conducted to understand students' perceived teaching, social, and cognitive presences in a scenario called "Assembling the Solar System," which had an immersive learning instructional design embedded in Learningverse. The study involved 36 postgraduate students in a course on the innovative design of interactive learning environments. The results showed that students perceived the three presences positively. Discussions were made, followed by design principles for the educational metaverse based on this study. Finally, future work was explored.

Purpose: Catering for learner diversity is a key issue in the recent educational reforms in Hong Kong. The present study addresses this issue through an investigation of the relationships between students' learning styles and approaches to learning in Hong Kong secondary schools. Design/Approach/Methods: A total of 6,054 junior secondary students in Hong Kong responded to a questionnaire consisting of two instruments. A series of confirmatory factor analysis, two-way analysis of variance, and structural equation modeling analysis were conducted. Findings: The results identified three types of learning style among the students which are characterized by a cognitive orientation, a social orientation, and a methodological orientation. Some significant gender- and achievement-level differences were revealed. Compared with the socially oriented learning style, the cognitively and methodologically oriented learning styles were more extensively and strongly related to students' approaches to learning, even though these students showed a greater preference for the socially oriented learning style. Originality/Value: It is unwise to blindly cater for students' learning styles in classroom teaching and curriculum design. Teachers should adopt a comprehensive and balanced approach toward the design of curriculum and teaching which not only highlights the congruence between students' learning styles and teacher's pedagogy but also integrates the constructive frictions between them into classroom teaching.

Currently, the challenges deriving from the complex and dynamic socio-political context in Hong Kong influence principals' and teachers' relationships and interactions. Academic autonomy in Hong Kong secondary schools is not simply granted by the principals, it is influenced by the society, school conditions and key stakeholders. This study employed qualitative methods to examine how principals negotiate the political context surrounding citizenship education and how these practices influence the civic learning in schools. The results revealed that in school citizenship education, when principals lacked a clear vision of citizenship education, most teachers were compliant and avoided discussing controversial political topics with their students. Such teachers had less autonomy and consequently less self-efficacy. When principals mediated the diverse needs of students and balanced the different expectations of school stakeholders, there were both compliant and critical teachers. Teacher autonomy and self-efficacy were also affected by the current socio-political context in Hong Kong. When principals had a clear school civic mission, the results differed across schools. These findings suggest that principals have to reflect on their own understanding of the purposes and perspectives of citizenship education significantly to meet the multiple demands of a complicated and turbulent socio-political environment.

This study investigated the mediation role of teacher resilience between job demands and resources and their well-being and job performance using a sample of 407 teachers from Hong Kong, SAR and mainland China. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were employed to deal with the dataset. The results indicated that the professional dimension and the emotional dimension of teacher resilience were affected by decision latitude (potential control over the job tasks and conducts) and school support respectively and predicted teacher well-being. The motivational dimension and the social dimension of teacher resilience promoted teacher job performance, influenced respectively by task overload (negatively) and role demand (positively) along with school support. This model is the first attempt to represent the relevance of the Job Demands-Resources theory that teacher resilience can buffer negative job demands and boost positive job resources to promote their well-being and performance in a specific societal and educational context. Implications for cultivating teacher resilience to everyday challenges and adversities were proposed in order to assist teachers to not only survive, recover, and thrive, but also to establish a school resilience cascade (potential resilience chain affecting a system due to an act of teacher resilience) for these turbulent times.

Students can only benefit from teacher feedback if they recognise its value for learning. However, there is still a lack of research to investigate the factors influencing students' perceptions of the value of teacher feedback in the context of learning English as a foreign language. This study investigated the impacts of two significant individual factors (i.e. possible second language (L2) selves and language learning strategies) of 687 college English learners on their perceived value of teacher feedback (i.e. grades and comments) in a Chinese university. Structural equation modelling analyses indicated the following: (i) Ideal L2 self significantly and positively predicted the perceived value of grades, both directly and indirectly (mediated by self-regulation strategies). (ii) Ideal L2 self significantly and positively predicted the perceived value of teacher comments, both directly and indirectly (mediated by social strategies and self-regulation strategies). (iii) Ought-to L2 self only indirectly predicted the perceived value of grades, mediated by memory strategies. The findings highlight students' proactive roles in the feedback process. Only if students aspire to become proficient English users and frequently use deep language learning strategies, they will perceive more value of teacher feedback and take up it for better learning.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer direct tests of the effectiveness of renaming vocational education and training (VET) in enhancing the image and popularity of the subject. Although many proponents of renaming argue that the word "vocational" is associated with lower levels of skills and knowledge and should therefore be supplemented by better recognised words, empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of this strategy is scant. Design/methodology/approach: This study exploits a rare policy change in Hong Kong, where VET was renamed as vocational and professional education and training (VPET) and conducted an original survey experiment of 1,004 parents in the city to test if the new name would improve respondents' perceptions of the subject. Findings: The findings reveal a complex picture regarding the effects of renaming. Although renaming does not seem to improve the overall popularity of vocational education, it may widen the support base for vocational education by diluting its class character. Specifically, while attitudes toward VET are significantly and negatively correlated with family income, no such association is found in regard to VPET. Originality/value: This paper offers the first direct and comprehensive test of the effectiveness of renaming vocational education -- a popular policy suggestion in many countries. Its findings complicate conventional expectations and contribute to the study of educational preferences in advanced economies.

Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty, national identity building became an important part of school education meeting some resistance in Hong Kong society. In 2012, thousands of school stakeholders protested against the introduction of the 2012 Guide of Moral and National Education (MNE). These conflicts have influenced teachers' attitudes towards MNE and curriculum choices. Employing the Model of Teachers' Perceptions of Moral and National Education, this research investigates the factors affecting teachers' perceptions of MNE, as a national identity building curriculum. The findings indicated that "perceived other support for MNE," "perceived non-monetary cost--benefits," "perceived concerns of MNE," and "comparison with the previous system (Moral and Civic education)" were the significant predictors for teachers' receptivity of MNE. The results suggested that if teachers were supported by others, they were more likely to support MNE; and they were less likely to support the implementation of MNE when teachers had serious concerns about it. The results recommended adding media and socio-political factors into the Model of Teachers' Receptivity to curriculum changes. The discussion will employ identity grafting (Lee in Managing Chineseness: Identity and ethnic management in Singapore, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017) as a point of comparison to identify the theoretical implications of MNE.

Although research conducted worldwide has pinpointed the importance of the cultivation of worldviews in citizenship education, little is known of how worldviews are constructed in the civics curriculum. In this study, we adopted a comparative historical approach to examine how China's civics curriculum has interpreted the meaning of life for young citizens during the transformation of the country from an empire into a nation-state. The data were drawn from 210 school textbooks published between 1902 and 2020. Four historical periods were delineated: the late Qing and Republican era, the Maoist era, the Deng Xiaoping era, and the current Xi Jinping administration. The findings demonstrated the trends and changes that took place while the ideal of citizenship and citizenship education took root, driving the modernisation of Chinese society. Through this study, we contribute to the theoretical discussions on enriching civics curriculum development from a humanist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigated the impact of online education on the learning and peer interaction experiences of students from eight universities in Hong Kong over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It employed an expansive and spatial notion of translanguaging to explore the process by which students drew on the affordance of virtual communication environments to communicate, study and develop new identities. The findings suggested (1) the students strategically mobilised manifold multimodal resources to constitute their communicative repertoires that facilitated smooth intercultural communication and academic success; (2) such communicative competence centralized the mediating effect of digital semiotic systems and thus might empower the students with disadvantaged language skills; and (3) through translanguaging acts the students developed a virtually translocal identity with an expanded experience of internationalisation of higher education whereby the increasingly interwoven physical and virtual spaces bring extended social networks, learning resources, and career opportunities. The implications of the findings were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores factors that predict students' self-assessment intentions and practices using a framework based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). A total of 1425 Hong Kong students (Primary 4 to Secondary 3) participated in this study. Students' intentions and practices pertaining to self-assessment and the predictors of their intentions and practices were assessed with 11 self-report scales aligned to the TPB constructs. The psychometric properties of scales were examined with Rasch analysis and the relations among the variables were investigated with path analysis based on Rasch-calibrated person measures. The results showed that attitude, subjective norms, self-efficacy, and perceived controllability were statistically significant predictors on intention to self-assess, while self-efficacy and intention had significant influence on self-assessment practice. Psychological safety was also found to have relatively weak but significant impact on both self-assessment intention and practice. This study lays a foundation for future investigations on how to promote meaningful self-assessment behaviour which is crucial for self-regulated and life-long learning.

This qualitative study investigates the interplay between the ethnic and academic identity construction of a group of university students with South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The findings indicate that ethnic identity and ethnic socialization have protective and facilitative effects on learning motivation and academic achievement. It is found that these ethnic minority students receiving tertiary education, holding congruent views of ethnic and academic identity, display a sense of agency and critical reflectivity of both the host society and their heritage communities and see facilitating community uplift and developing a more positive social image of ethnic minorities as their generation's responsibility. Reconstructing an ethnic identity and developing new social images therefore motivate them to pursue academic success. The findings indicate that the South Asian students figured out ways in which to interact with the outer world and set up new roles and spaces (i.e., a heritage community with more positive social image). The findings shed light on how to provide better opportunities for and assistance to ethnic minority students when they pursue higher education.

This paper investigates quality assurance in Chinese higher education by looking at the Evaluation of the University Baccalaureate Programmes Project (EUBPP) conducted in China. It analyses factors that bring about tensions between policy and practice in this area through a study of two contrasting tertiary institutions. The results show that the aims of the EUBPP have been partly achieved through the interaction of policy-making and implementation. In the process, contextual factors connected to institutional status and stages of development have led to varying degrees of tension between policy and practices.