The present study aims to examine the contribution of cognitive flexibility to metalinguistic skills and reading comprehension during primary school years. Forty-nine third-grade primary school children completed the measures of cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic skills including syntactic awareness (word order knowledge), morphosyntactic skill…

This study describes the development and validation of a psychometrically-sound instrument, the Active Learning Strategies Inventory (ALSI), designed to measure learners' perceptions of their active learning strategies within an active learning context. Active learning encompasses a broad range of pedagogical practices and instructional methods…

With the aim to provide proper educational support for socially and economically deprived students, the present study examined a homework tutoring programme that focused on self-regulated learning (SRL) and implemented at an afterschool setting in Hong Kong. The programme was designed according to Zimmerman's SRL model, integrated explicit and…

This study examines the range of cognitive processes assessed in the English language reading literacy test as part of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE), the secondary school exit test in Hong Kong. Prior studies have suggested that higher order cognitive processes are often undermined in high-stakes tests and…

Task complexity and communication modes are two task design and implementation factors that have been found to affect second language (L2) learners' oral performance. While increasing task complexity and developing tasks according to the features of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication modes can optimise L2 production, few studies…

In this study, a modified version of the Curriculum Orientation Inventory for Early Childhood Education (COI-ECE) is developed and validated with a sample of 717 in-service teachers from fifty Hong Kong pre-primary schools. Results of confirmatory factor analysis show that the curriculum beliefs of pre-primary school teachers can be conceptualised…

During the pandemic, school and university students had to urgently move away from traditional classrooms to online learning in their homes. Student engagement that can be explained by self-determination theory (SDT) is important in online learning. Indeed, the founders of SDT recently stated that SDT-based future research should look closely at…

Although peer feedback is highly valued in the feedback process, the specific contribution of feedback providers in this process remains unclear. In this qualitative multiple-case study, the primary focus was to explore the contribution of feedback providers and the benefits they obtained through online peer micro-teaching practices. The study…

Strategy use is a critical competence for academic achievement and problem solving in globalised and information-based knowledge economies. It involves skills such as synthesising information from task source materials and elaborating on interlocutors' viewpoints during integrated group discussions. However, evidence from empirical studies on this…

It has been debated whether the progressive emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in autistic children is compatible with a "delayed" or "different" development model, and whether and how the sequential consolidation of ToM concepts is subject to cross-cultural variations in autistic and typically developing (TD) children. To study…

Drawing on Geary's (1995) evolution-based model of cognitive and academic development, this study investigated the relation between biologically primary skills (vocabulary, executive functions, and visual-spatial processing) and subsequent word reading and calculation. It also examined the extent to which these relations were mediated by…

For a service-learning course focusing on poverty, students from a Hong Kong university took a 12-day trip to engage in various poverty alleviation services in Cambodia. This course was border-crossing on five dimensions: (1) urban versus rural, (2) developed versus developing world location, (3) classroom versus practical and experiential, (4)…

Cognitive interviewing (CI) provides a method of systematically collecting validity evidence of response processes for questionnaire items. CI involves a range of techniques for prompting individuals to verbalise their responses to items. One such technique is concurrent verbalisation, as developed in Think Aloud Protocol (TAP). This article…

This chapter critically reviews the official document "Kindergarten Education Curriculum Guide" (2017) in Hong Kong by using the concept of five curriculum orientations as an analytical tool. The five curriculum orientations are academic; cognitive process; social reconstruction; humanistic; and technological. The analysis covers the…

The aim of this article is to reveal the ways in which six 14- to 15-year-old second language (L2) learners, two each of high, mid, and low English proficiency levels were cognitively engaged in writing while using an automated content feedback program known as the Essay Critiquing System 2.0 in three out of five workshops in a Hong Kong secondary…