Research Project of CRI

This phase of the project complements Phase 1 – the initial investigation into benchmarks. It seeks to refine and finalise the benchmark specifications and to moderate and to finalise the syllabus, rating scales and descriptors for the benchmarks, including information for the public. It also involves liaising with the HKEA, its subject Committee and the ACTEQ Task Force in all these areas.

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between English language proficiency and students' range of vocabulary in terms of word frequency. It is hypothesised that students who are more able in English will demonstrate control over a greater number of less frequent vocabulary items, which will be demonstrated across a range of levels of proficiency. The study will be a useful addition to the current research into the growing area of vocabulary research, where empirically based studies, such as the one proposed, have only recently come to the forefront, involving access to large corpora of English language data. It will involve analysing a substantial sample of Secondary 7 written material; some 200 Use of English examination scripts of 500 words each will be analysed.

This phase of the project deals with the pre-piloting and validation of innovative assessment tasks and their associated descriptors for language benchmarks in order to determine whether they are operationalisable in the Hong Kong context.

This phase of the project will be carried out in association with members of the ACTEQ Subject Committee and HKEA personnel. The researchers have been requested by ACTEQ and the HKEA to participate in this phase in order to launch the project. It will involve two aspects of assessment materials development:

(1) the creation of exemplar material for presentation to the English language teaching community.

(2) the creation of "live" test material for the formal large-scale pilot stage of the setting of English language benchmarks for use in Hong Kong.

This study is a pioneering research into preschool environmental education in Hong Kong. The major objectives of this research are (1) to study the status of environmental education in Hong Kong preschools; (2) to study the curriculum commonplaces and approaches to environmental education emphasised by preschool teachers in designing environmental education curricula; and (3) to study the lived experience of implementing environmental education as a curriculum change by preschool teachers. The research will be divided into two phase. In phase one, two questionnaire surveys will be conducted. In phase two, schools having high, medium and low aggregate scores in implementing environmental education namely the extent of teaching environmental issues and achieving environmental education objectives, based on the second questionnaire survey will be chosen. Semi-structured interviews with teachers in these schools will be conducted.

This study tries to find out the relationship between student teachers' academic achievement and their learning style. The aim is to preliminary investigate whether is a possibility in designing specific strategies to teach the Faculty's students.

The aim of the project is to integrate an on-going project, called Electronic Homework (Lee, 1996a, 1996b), with the project Lisa developed by the National Research Council sponsored by Laboratory of Excellence on Learning Science and Technology

in Taiwan. Electronic Homework is an intelligent tutoring system to teach mathematics while Lisa is a ',shared teaching material repositories, networked social peer learning environments, homework assignment management system, intelligent agents, learner data mining, teacher real-time monitoring system, and models of co-ordination in networked lecturing'. By incorporating the technologies of Lisa into Electronic Homework, it is hope that a teleteaching system (Trentin, 1996) can be developed in the Internet to teach mathematics. With suitable modification, it is also hoped the system can be used to teach courses offered by the faculty in the near future.

The project can be divided into two parts. The first is a trial run in 6 primary schools and the second is community service of providing low cost magnetic teaching aids to all Hong Kong Schools.

The trial run in 6 primary schools was a failure' seminar was held in the staff development day for each of the participating schools to promote the use of magnetic backed cards in 1995 and 1996. These schools are:

Initial questionnaires revealed that over 80% teachers in these schools welcomed the idea of trying out the present program in their schools. Tens of thousands magnetic backed word and picture cards based on the suggestion from schools 3 had been constructed in summer by student helpers. The cards were sorted into 3 sets. A questionnaire was sent to six primary schools in 20 Jan, 97 to remind them on categorization and use of the cards received. It was discovered that, the schools were not able to make full use of these cards. With the exception of only one teacher in school 1, all teachers refuse to take part in seminars to share their experiences with other teachers. There were seven reasons why the schools did not make full use of these cards. First, there we too many cards that the teachers did not know how start with. Second, they adopted the TOC scheme recently and changed their textbooks. Third, they did not have enough manpower to sort out the car Fourth, they were not able to figure out a satisfactory self-help retrieval system. Fifth, there was 4 magnetic board in some classrooms at the moment they received the cards. Sixth, in school 2, due to renovation, they did not have enough space to store the cards. Seventh, despite the seminars and demos, some teachers hesitated to try new ways of teaching. To the best they could, the researchers had suggested many ways to help them solve these problems. Their support included coaching and school visits.

The provision of low-cost magnetic aids to schools was a success. Several seminars were held in 1997 and 1997 to promote the use of magnetic card/board games in the teaching of language and general studies. An order form of 22 items was distributed to participants in these seminars so that they could order magnetic teaching aids for their schools. Most of the products are blank magnetic-backed plastic and picture cards on special topics (with game rules). The researchers received orders from no less than 30 schools in 1997 and they had processed up to 35 orders in the first seven months in 1998. They can support themselves without further funding in the future development of magnetic teaching aids.

From the number of orders received, the researchers found that most primary school and kindergarten teachers who participated in the seminars were convinced that display board activities using magnetic -backing cards could be interesting.

The researchers need more publicity to make their project and service accessible to more teachers and schools, in particular to teachers in the kindergarten.

Because large computer screens and projectors are very expensive, game-card activities still has a lot of room for further development in the primary school classroom.

It was a big mistake to donate a lot of teaching aids (work cards) to school and let the headmaster push the teachers to use these aids.

The government should have a provision of at least one technician in each primary school to take care of computers and other teaching aids.

WONG Hin Wah * LEE Chi Kin John * NI Yujing (Educational Psychology) & HAU Kit Tai (Educational Psychology) * HUI Kwok Fai*

This study is the second phase of a long term evaluation exercise namely: An Evaluation of the 9 year Compulsory Education of Hong Kong.

The first phase, which was commissioned by the Education Department of Hong Kong, involved conducting a 'comprehensive review of the 9-year compulsory schooling of Hong Kong in 1996. The purposes of the research are to review the aims of the nine-year compulsory education; to assess the effectiveness of the policies, strategies and measures of the nine-year compulsory education and to make recommendations for improvement if the existing policies and systems are inadequate.

The second phase, i.e. the research of this proposal will focus on the following areas to delineate the causes of students' learning problems which have not been addressed thoroughly and deeply enough during the first phase:

(1) the nature (selective vs. universal education) of the formal and instructional curriculum;

The resulting effect of the interaction of these three areas on students' learning problems will also be investigated.

Based on the findings of these inquiries, this study will provide background knowledge for the following:

In Hong Kong, the ad-hoc committee for holistic review of the mathematics curriculum from primary to sixth form levels has been set up in the Curriculum Development Council, which will recommend a reform of the mathematics curriculum. It is the right time to make a thorough investigation of the strengths and inadequacies of mathematics learning among Hong Kong students. In recent years, a research team comprising the investigators and their research students have launched the appraisal of the Hong Kong mathematics curriculum and those in neighbouring regions. Kong (1996, 1997); Ma (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997); Wong, Lam, Wong (1995) and Wong, Wong, & Lam (1995) are some of the papers published so far. In 1996, the team began to develop instruments for a holistic appraisal. In the present project, the researchers proceed with the investigation on the learning style and difficulties in the learning mathematics with the help of the instruments developed in the last project. Eighteen students each from P.3, P.6, S.1 and S.3 will be interviewed to reveal their conception of mathematics, learning style and problems they encountered in the learning process. Stimulated recall of their approaches to solving mathematical problem will be used. Their classworks will also be collected and their common misconceptions identified.

WONG Ngai Ying * LAM Chi Chung * WONG Ka Ming Patrick * LEUNG Koon Shing Frederick* * MOK Ah Chee, Ida*

The views of students, parents, teachers, employers and stake-holders towards the primary and secondary

mathematics curriculum will be collected and analysed. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be utilized.

Edition	Title/Investigators
1995-96	Pedagogy of Chinese Language(ED95059) CHOW Hon Kwong
1995-96	Research on Teaching of Chinese Culture in Chinese Language Teaching(ED95060) CHOW Hon Kwong
1995-96	The Status and Needs Assessment of Environmental Education in Primary Schools (ED95015) LEE Chi Kin John WONG HinWah
1995-96	Teacher Receptivity to Curriculum Changes (ED95042) LEE Chi Kin John
1994-95	Teacher Effectiveness: A Study of Routine-use Among Primary School Teachers (ED94023) LEE Fong Lok LIN Wen Ying (Educational Psychology)
1995-96	The Development of a Computer-assisted Instructional System to Correct Students’Ill-structured Sentences in Chinese (ED95058) LEE Fong Lok CHOW Hon Kwong
1995-96	An Activity Kit for the Teaching, Chinese Language in Primary Schools- An Application of Magnetic-Board Card Games (ED95056) MAK Se Yuen Ho Man Koon
1995-96	The Use of Magnetic Card Activities the Teaching of English in Primary Lower Secondary Schools (ED95052) SZE Man Man Paul MAK Se Yuen
1996-97	Survey on the Parents' Rights and Responsibilities in Their Children’s Education (ED96029) TANG Yiu Nam HO Sui chu (Educational Administration & Policy) YIP Wai Ming
1994-95	A Study of the Design, Development and Implementation of Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC) Hong Kong (ED93028) WONG Hin Wah LAM Chi Chung LEE Chi Kin John WONG Ngai Ying
1995-96	Research and Development Programme on Teaching and Curriculum for Chinese in Primary and Secondary Schools (ED92028) WONG Hin Wah FONG Kan Hay YEUNG Chi Kwan YUENG kwai Hong CHOW Hon Kwong
1995-96	Education and Development in South China: A Study of the Supply and Demand of School Teachers(ED94035) WONG Hin Wah CHUNG Stephen Yue Ping (Educational Administration & Policy) LO Leslie Nai Kwai (Educational Administration & Policy)
1996-97	Mathematics Curriculum Reform for Universal Education: Development of Instruments (ED96016) WONG Ngai Ying LAM Chi Chung WONG Ka Ming Patrick
1996-97	A Discussion of Exceptional Corresponding Rules When Deriving Modern Cantonese Pronunciations from Fan-chieh used at Sui-T’ang Times (AL96003) YU Nae Wing