The examination-oriented assessment methods have been widely employed in Macau but the over-dependence on such methods may hinder students’ balanced development of mathematical proficiency (Morrison & Tang, 2002; Schoenfeld, 2007). Peer assessment may compensate the limitation of those methods by engaging students actively to assess. However, little research has focused on the implementation of peer assessment in Macau secondary school. This dissertation reports a study which implemented a five-step peer assessment in an eighth grade mathematics lesson in Macau based on Ploegh at al.’s (2009) and Tillema et al.’s (2011) frameworks, in which the quality criteria are taken into account for revising the procedures. 16 students participated in three action cycles and the action plan was modified to explore how the changes to the peer assessment may influence students’ learning and students’ views towards the implementation of peer assessment. The results show that it is effective to establish a formative peer assessment to promote students’ mathematical learning in Macau by adopting the frameworks. The students in general held positive attitude towards the implementation of the peer assessment. They regarded it as a fair assessment, appreciated the extra opportunity to discuss mathematics, and treated it as a way to collect more feedback on their strength and weakness. Peer assessment also served as a learning activity which helped them gain deeper understanding of mathematics. It was found that students’ involvement in the setting of the assessment criteria, making judgment and writing narrative feedback improved students’ use of mathematical language to express their ideas. Providing more opportunities to judge and discuss mathematical problems also fostered the development of their mathematical proficiency. This study also reveals that asking peers for feedback and discussion about the feedback is an efficient way to develop students’ adaptive reasoning. The students’ change of performance in the action cycles also suggests that peer assessment has the potential to help the students access higher level of development in their zone of proximal development (ZPD) and balance the role of authority in mathematics classroom. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Ever since the curriculum reform was launched, 'Reading to Learn' has been one of the four key tasks initiated. The result shown in Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS,2011) reflected that the reading ability of Hong Kong Primary students is among the best in the world, whereas their reading motivation ranking the last. Researchers also found in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2009) conducted among secondary students that their metacognitive level is the lowest among all the secondary students in South-east Asian districts. It reflected that Hong Kong students lack self-regulation and comprehension monitoring awareness in reading. This dissertation is written in support of an action research and a case study. It aims to discuss the impact on the implementation of teaching of reading strategies on four different primary students, who are of diverse ability on comprehension. In the action research, the researcher tries to enhance students' comprehension monitoring awareness through introducing the K-W-L Chart and Directed Reading and Thinking Activity. In the case study, the researcher makes use of think aloud activities and student interviews to collect and analyze the qualitative data obtained. Together with the quantitative analysis, the researcher studies the reading strategies used among the four selected primary 4 students as well as their understanding toward reading strategies before and after they received the teaching in the process. The research result reflects that teaching reading strategies has a significant effect on enhancing student's reading comprehension monitoring awareness among students, especially the lower ability students. Furthermore, this research makes a few practical suggestions on how to enhance students' reading comprehension awareness in daily teaching. 自課程改革(以下簡稱「課改」)以來，「從閱讀中學習」一直為課改四大關鍵項目之一。「全球學生閱讀能力進展研究(PIRLS，2011)」的結果反映本港小學生的閱讀能力冠絕全球，閱讀動機卻在全球榜尾的奇怪現象；而以中學生為對象的「學生基礎素養能力計劃(PISA，2009)」亦發現本港學生的後設認知能力水平為全東南亞地區最差，反映本港學生在閱讀方面缺乏自我調整和閱讀監控的意識。 本論文旨在以行動研究(action research)及個案研究(case study)方式，探討閱讀策略教學對促進四位小學四年級不同能力學生的閱讀理解監控知覺的影響。在行動研究方面，研究員通過教授自我檢測圖及引領思維閱讀策略，促進學生的理解監控知覺。在個案研究方面，通過放聲思考(think aloud)活動及學生訪談，搜集及分析質性數據，並結合量性分析，探討本港某小學四位四年級學生於接受教學前後，在閱讀過程中運用閱讀策略的情況，以及他們對閱讀策略的認識。研究結果反映，閱讀策略教學對促進學生的閱讀理解監控知覺對於閱讀能力較弱的學生，有明顯的影響。此外，本研究就如何在日常教學中教授閱讀策略，以提升學生的閱讀理解監控知覺方面提出一些建議。 / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Given the current availability of newly-designed textbooks for senior secondary geography teachers and the limited focus on their role in promoting students’ ‘meaningful learning’ advocated in the curriculum reform, a study of teachers’ use of geography textbooks in Hong Kong is particularly timely. Seeking to know the teachers’ practice of using geography textbooks, this study aims at describing and explaining how teachers use the two sets of textbooks, and exploring how their use might be improved in the context of particular classrooms to bring about meaningful learning among students. Two single cases of teacher participants were chosen for study. A holistic case study approach was adopted with a wide range of qualitative research techniques, namely observation, interviews, documentation and journal-writing. Drawing on Remillard’s model of teachers’ role in curriculum development (1999), data collected for each case was analyzed to understand teacher’s activity of using textbooks in curriculum mapping, design and construction arenas. The findings showed that teachers may have different levels of engagement with the textbooks in different dimensions of teaching. Textbooks were generally used as a major source of knowledge in the content determination. Yet, teachers neither used them alone nor followed them slavishly. Driven by the advocacy of constructivist approach to learning, they not only chose relevant tasks from textbooks for students to undertake, but also used the textbooks as one of the sources of geographical ideas or stimulus materials to design the tasks with a focus on different levels of cognition for in-class activities. During the lessons, the PowerPoint files which came along with the prescribed textbooks were widely used for an exposition or reinforcement of students’ work. They were also flexibly used and adapted according to teachers’ spontaneous decisions to varying extents. Teachers’ diversity in their ways of using geography textbooks stemmed from the interaction between their different individual characteristics in terms of experience, knowledge and beliefs, and the textbooks in varying contexts. To a broader context, their diverse ways of using textbooks could be attributed to their different degrees of being influenced by public examination, lesson time, institutional polices and organization norms, professional development opportunities and computer infrastructure, as well as their attitudes towards students’ characteristics. It was worth noting that the constraints in the circumstances of teaching, such as time constraints for lesson preparation, sometimes made teachers difficult to perform their ideal teaching and learning roles. According to the three principles proposed by Hooper and Rieber (1999:258-260), certain ways of using the textbooks could generate the opportunities for supporting students’ meaningful learning were unveiled in this study. First, teachers who chose the essential content, selected important tasks and designed meaningful tasks based on the text and illustrations could provide opportunities for students to have active processing of lesson content. Next, the use of multitext approach in the group enquiry tasks, oral presentation and debriefing sessions could allow students to expose to information from multiple perspectives. Third, the presentation of content in the form of cases or examples, and the use of tasks or case studies in the textbooks for authentic work, issue-based or case-based enquiry learning could build upon students’ knowledge and life experience in meaningful contexts. Teachers’ interaction with textbooks did not guarantee the generation of meaningful learning outcome. To improve the ways of textbook use for students’ meaningful learning, several feasible strategies were identified. To cope with students’ limited capacity of working memory, teachers may slow down the pace of presentation, avoid students doing unnecessary tasks, and use suitable modes and structures of the presentation of information for students with different cognitive styles. Selective use of materials and props provided by the publishers could avoid the repetition of content and increase students’ interest in processing of lesson content. To increase students’ mental engagement in the tasks, their learning attitudes should be improved through interesting tasks in the textbooks, rewarding practice, team competition and small group work. It was also important to connect the content in the tasks to their existing knowledge through providing conditional knowledge, making the text more comprehensible to students and using visual images with more explicit information. Some higher-order questions should be added in the ready-made tasks to cater for diverse students’ abilities. Group work could be used to help the lower achievers in these tasks. Regarding the use of supplementary materials, teachers should use PowerPoints and their own resources together to sustain students’ engagement in the cognitive tasks. Since it was not easy to transfer knowledge through animations, words should be better presented as narration than on-screen text. To increase group engagement in the tasks, group work should be properly managed. Finally, teachers should make students familiar with real-life contexts before they started engaging them in tasks. In conclusion, teachers can use the textbooks to provide opportunities for students’ meaningful learning, but this sometimes became unattainable because of difficulties in the circumstances of teaching. Findings suggested that more efforts should be made to improve initial teacher education programme, increase teachers’ professional development opportunities, provide more useful offerings in the textbooks, relieve the problems of time constraints for lesson preparation and inadequate lesson time, and teach students’ enquiry skills and collaborative skills. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education

The purpose of this research is to understand the journey of developing “global citizenship” among undergraduates at The University of Hong Kong (the “University”) as influenced by internationalization and globalization. The reality of the global village where modern communications and travel networks have overcome geography to enable people with different cultures, values, and ways of life to share resources and virtual spaces needs to be recognized and addressed. Globalization is a double-edged sword, creating new possibilities as it transforms the fabrics of societies even as it destabilizes common social understandings and practices in ways that impede the advancement and betterment of humanity. Struggling with these possibilities and uncertainties, universities face the challenge of developing “global citizens” capable of bringing positive change and increasing social capital across different levels of society in addition to their traditional academic role. Students are now routinely steered towards “global” experiences such as study abroad, travel, service learning, and participation in the global community locally and internationally. These experiences can facilitate the development of global citizenship helping students become culturally sensitive, interculturally competent, and socially conscious; thus understanding the needs of humanity from different value orientations and perspectives. The University has interpreted and embodied the meaning of “global citizenship” as qualities and abilities that serve and improve humanity, and has attempted to develop students who are interculturally competent in the knowledge, skills and behaviour that contribute positively to societal needs. These interpretations are embedded in policy strategies and implementations, curriculum design and pedagogy, and are supported by activities that contribute to learning and making sense of “global citizenship” among students. Narrative inquiry solicits students’ experiences in “global” endeavours and elucidates the way they understand, embody and perform “global citizenship” as a process of becoming “global citizens.” The stories and their subtexts reveal current culture(s) and “identit(ies)” that are complex systems of social, political and personal nature. Four typologies of students emerged from these findings and analyses – the Achievers, Learners, Explorers, and Builders, which reveal the dispositions and characteristics of students’ attitudes, perspectives, affinities and behaviours in relation to “global citizenship.” As globalization challenges our understanding of our identities that are essentially concerned with who we are as individuals and as social beings, this research challenges the traditional understandings of “citizenship” and suggests that its cultural interpretations and enactments are performed individually and co-created socially. This thesis demonstrates the critical importance of mentorship and purposeful design of experience to most effectively enrich the sel(ves) and to facilitate the likelihood of students becoming integrated beings exemplifying global citizenship, amidst the complexities and controversies surrounding globalization. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

In the context of social and economic globalisation, the nature and uses of literacy have been profoundly impacted by information technologies, giving rise to an increasing variety of multimodal, digitally mediated texts, practices and relationships called new literacies. This study explores how new literacies were taken up by teachers and students in English Language (English as a Second/Foreign Language) classrooms in Hong Kong primary schools. Set within a government funded project aimed at promoting new literacies in Hong Kong schools, the study specifically explores the discursive tensions amongst the English Language curriculum and new literacies practices and pedagogies, and how students and teachers negotiated these tensions and appropriated new literacies practices as they planned and enacted a new literacies task within a curriculum unit. The research design involved a critical policy text analysis and a multi-case study within a poststructuralist discourse analytic approach illuminated by Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of fantasy and enjoyment. Extracts of key policy texts and New Literacies Project texts were selected for critical discourse analysis. The multi-case study of three new literacies curriculum units, enacted by three classes of students and their teachers in two local Hong Kong primary schools, focussed on various new literacies practices. Data collected for the multi-case study included recordings of lessons and planning meetings, participant observation with field notes, observations of material and virtual contexts such as computer labs and online sites, students’ classroom work and digital products, and teacher and student interviews. In the process of mapping the discursive constructions, tensions and contradictions of new literacies across policy texts and classroom enactments, three ‘economies’ emerged in the findings. Tensions between the knowledge economy of globalised educational and curriculum policies emphasising language forms and linguistic skills, and the attention economy of new literacies involving students’ creative multimodal production and consumption and the accumulation of attention in online interactions, were negotiated by students, teachers and the Project researcher (myself) in the three school cases. A key, if unanticipated finding, however, was the emergence of an economy of enjoyment, involving the transgression of classroom social norms and the subversion of symbolic authority in students’ digital products and online interactions. Enjoyment was also found in the ways some students were captivated by online interactions and the pursuit of celebrity identities, and in teachers’ intense commitments to and anxieties around particular discourses and subjectivities. The study concludes with a discussion of the significance of psychoanalytic notions of enjoyment in new literacies in curriculum policy and practice, and suggests implications for research and practice of new literacies in the context of globalised educational policies. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study investigates whether principles of learner autonomy are integrated into ELT textbooks used in Hong Kong primary schools. Primary quantitative data were generated through an analysis of textbooks, and the supporting qualitative data came from interviews with teachers and lesson observations. Two sets with a total of twelve English language textbooks published for Primary Four, Primary Five and Primary Six students by Oxford University Press (China) Ltd. and Pearson Hong Kong were evaluated. Five teachers participated in the interviews while lesson observations were conducted with three of them. The results show that principles of learner autonomy are included in the textbooks to some extent. Out of the five key principles of learner autonomy, only self-assessment is achieved fully. The other key principles are partly achieved (i.e. self-selecting learning strategies, self-selecting materials and classroom activities) or not achieved (i.e. self-setting goals and self-reflection). There is currently not enough attention given in these primary ELT textbooks to promoting learner autonomy. In addition, it is found that there is no great difference in the degree of learner autonomy promoted across educational levels. The findings also suggest that different authors have different levels of awareness of promoting learner autonomy. This study concludes that a set of guidelines about the incorporation of principles relating to learner autonomy would facilitate authors and publishers in designing textbooks. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

With the implementation of the new three-year senior secondary curriculum in September 2009 which stipulated that Language Arts would become a compulsory component in the English curriculum, literature plays a more prominent role in the teaching of English in Hong Kong. The incorporation of literature into language education, as Carter and Long (1991) illustrate, enhances the linguistic competence and enriches the cultural knowledge as well as stimulates the personal growth of learners. 　　Among various literary genres, the use of poetry is worth researching into given that students in Hong Kong tend to have reservations about using it as a tool to learn English despite its value. Poetry, as Tomlinson (1986) argues, is able to strengthen the skills of learners to infer and interpret from the linguistic and situational contexts of texts. Its value also lies in the fact that learners of different abilities can make use of poems in different ways. Therefore, there is a pressing need to investigate how the use of poems in English classes can be enhanced. 　　English translations of popular Chinese poems were used alongside classic poems from the West in this study to see whether the cultural familiarity and linguistic support embodied in translated poems could enhance the use of poems among students and teachers. This study found that while most students remained negative to learning English through poems, the use of translated poems was positively received among the high achievers and teachers. Based on the findings, some suggestions were derived to help schools incorporate poems into the English curriculum. / published_or_final_version / Applied English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

This study aimed to explore Hong Kong primary school students’ development of story writing in Chinese, by examining the fluency, structure and organization ability, and communication ability. It was a basic research that adopted qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. In total, 2823 pieces of Chinese story writing were collected from three Hong Kong primary schools; 1200 samples were randomly selected for analysis in details. In analysing the selected samples, the total numbers of words and sentences were first identified. Then, the type of structural organization with reference to story schema, and their communication elements were studied. Finally, the data were used for additional statistical analysis. The study showed that primary school students’ ability in writing Chinese stories was developmental and with variety of ability within each class level. The fluency, structure and organization ability, and communication ability were gradually improved when students got older. This study has four major findings. First, the total numbers of words and sentences were increased at each grade level. Difference in the total numbers of words and sentences within the same class level was significantly found in Primary Four and difference became larger in Primary Five and Six. Second, the story schema which students constructed in their story writing was more and more complex as they grew up. Third, the older subject students could write much more rich contents in the beginning and ending of story. Fourth, the older subject students were more skilled at using the communication elements in the beginning of story, and expressing major theme through the story writing. The study’s results enrich the understanding of the theories of the language development of children and their story writing. It also provides valuable information for the researchers in the related areas, and the teachers who teach Chinese and design Chinese writing curriculum. However, this study is only an exploratory attempt to study Hong Kong primary school students’ development of story writing in Chinese; further verification of its findings and test are needed. 本研究旨在探討三所香港小學生的中文故事寫作能力發展。研究是一項基礎研究，採用質性和量性的研究方法，分析研究對象中文故事寫作的流暢性、結構組織能力和傳意能力。本研究從三所小學搜集了2823篇中文故事寫作研究樣本，再以隨機抽樣的方式抽取1200篇作為分析之用。最後，對所得的數據會進行統計分析，以了解研究對象的中文故事寫作能力發展。 研究結果顯示，研究對象的中文故事寫作能力具發展性和差異性，會隨?年級的增長，在流暢性、結構組織能力和傳意能力方面的表現會有所提升。流暢性方面，研究對象寫作的「總字數」和「總句數」均隨?年級逐年的上升而穩步增加，而各級研究對象的表現均有明顯的差異，並在小四年級開始擴大。結構組織能力方面，研究對象在中文故事寫作中應用的故事結構圖式，隨?年級的增長而趨於複雜。按研究對象的故事結構組織能力，大致上可以把他們分成三段發展階段。第一組為小一和小二，第二組為小三和小四，第三組為小五和小六。研究對象的開端鋪敘能力和故事結構組織能力一樣，大致可以分為三段發展階段。結尾鋪敘能力方面，亦是隨?年級的增長而鋪敘更多的故事內容。不過，敘述觀點卻沒有呈現發展的趨勢。傳意能力方面，研究對象雖然會隨?年級的增長，更能在故事的開端部份加入傳意元素，但能夠在中文故事寫作的開端部份加入傳意元素的研究對象不多，而且較多集中在高年級。至於透過故事寫作傳達主題思想方面，小三至小六年級中，明顯有較多研究對象能夠在中文故事寫作中傳遞主題思想。 本研究探討了三所小學生的中文故事寫作能力發展，研究的結果豐富了兒童語言發展和故事寫作理論，亦為進行相關研究的學者，以及規劃中國語文寫作課程或教學的教師，提供了有價值的資料。不過，本研究是一項初步的探索性研究，所取得的發現有待進一步證實和發展。 / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education