Sub-degree education is one of the key higher education sectors in Hong Kong. With the effect of managerialism, tertiary institutions tend to transition from a collegial toward a managerial model, and have shifted from teaching-intensive institutions to research-intensive ones. In this study, two key research questions are addressed: to what…

Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of four cross-institutional teaching enhancement projects (TEPs), a relatively new form of professional collaboration. The focus is on the impact at departmental, institutional and cross-institutional levels because such impact is the main reason for establishing cross-institutional TEPs.…

Feedback processes are situated within the norms and practices of disciplinary learning activities. Through a sociocultural lens, this study seeks to understand disciplinary feedback possibilities and challenges through a study of four different disciplines at a research-intensive English medium university. Two soft applied and two hard applied…

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) allows students to mobilize a wide range of multimodal resources to make meaning. While studies in DMC tended to focus on language-learning contexts, few of them examine its use in content-based courses whereby students are proficient L2 users expected to demonstrate understanding of abstract concepts using DMC.…

In determining whether stumbling blocks exist in the implementation of accounting education reform in Hong Kong, a survey questionnaire was sent to all accounting departments at public universities representing accounting academics, and the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants representing the profession. The survey showed that both…

Purpose: Teacher learning communities (TLCs) formed within subject departments are conceptualized as reform platform for facilitating school improvement and teacher development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which three TLCs were structured and managed for generating change capability in secondary schools in Hong Kong.…

Research on school improvement tends to assume that school improvement is a school-wide process. Nonetheless, some researchers have also proposed that secondary schools are comprised of subcultures centered on subject area departments. It has further been suggested that variations in the sociocultural organization of subject departments could…

This article reports a case study that investigated the ways in which heads of subject departments managed the development and application of new assessment strategies in one secondary school in Hong Kong. The data of the study were gathered through participant observation and interviews with 12 teachers who participated in an assessment for…

Factors leading to successful professional learning communities (PLCs) have been widely discussed in the West, but little is known about how/whether teachers' beliefs contribute to PLCs in the Chinese context. This qualitative case study aimed to investigate teachers' beliefs about teacher learning in PLCs and their influence on collegial learning…

This article examines an established course on Popular Culture which is framed within the general educational model in an English-medium university. The article is organized into three parts: the underlining educational rationale for general educational courses, the course description, and the students' perspectives of their learning experience.…

Hong Kong's universities have been attracting non-local students to diversify the overall student mix and enhance internationalism in higher education. Mainland Chinese students have become the largest non-local student source in this Western-style higher education sector. The diversity of student body together with the promotion of multicultural…

Examined the multivariate effects of various course characteristics on student ratings of faculty at a Hong Kong university. Data consisted of 4996 course average ratings from 25 departments over two academic years. Significant differences were found in student ratings across academic disciplines, class size groups, course levels, types of course,…