Both formative assessment and growth mindset scholars aim to understand how to enhance achievement. While research on formative assessment focuses on external teaching practices, work on growth mindset emphasises internal psychological processes. This study examined the interplay between three formative assessment strategies (i.e. sharing learning…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…

This study investigated the associations among reading strategy instruction, student motivational factors (i.e., attitudes toward reading, reading self-concept, and motivation to read), gender, and reading achievement. The analyses were conducted using the Hong Kong sample (students at Level 1, n = 3,875 and teachers at Level 2, n = 133) from the…

Based on the data of Program for International Student Assessment 2009, this paper examines how various aspects of home literacy environment, school climate and students' reading engagement related to their reading performance. A profile of Hong Kong students' three indices of reading engagement -- namely, reading enjoyment, reading diversity and…

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) robustly predicts early reading abilities across languages, but its underlying mechanism remains unclear. This study found that RAN associated significantly with processing speed but not with phonological awareness or orthographic knowledge in 89 Hong Kong Chinese second-graders. RAN overlaps more with processing…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

The present study investigated the relative importance of executive functioning, parent-child verbal interactions, phonological awareness and visual skills on reading and mathematics for Chinese children from low-versus middle-socio economic status (SES) backgrounds. A total of 199 kindergarten children were assessed on executive functioning,…

Background: This study examined the impact of the reading-related affective factors "home environment" and school "environment" on predicting the likelihood of students being either high-proficiency or low-proficiency readers. Data from 3,875 Hong Kong SAR Grade 4 students participating in an international comparative…

Using data drawn from the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted in 2009, the present study sought to examine the mediating effects of three kinds of variables in order to account for the relationships between gender and the digital reading performance of students. The three kinds of variables are (1) online reading…

This study investigated the relationships among Hong Kong Chinese students' reading attainment in Chinese and English, their attitudes toward reading, and their self-concept as readers. The sample consisted of 1,232 fourth-grade students from thirty-eight primary schools. Predictably, the students' reading attainment was better when tested in…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is an international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades that has been conducted every four years since 1995, with the most recent assessment in 2011. PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is an international assessment of reading…

The cultural capital in families, more specifically, the educational level of parents, has during the last decades been shown to be the most important dimension of socioeconomic influence on school performance in many countries. Less is known about the factors that actually mediate this influence. The aim, therefore, is to investigate the relative…

The English reading comprehension ability of 4,352 Grade 4 Hong Kong students was tested. The students' parents completed questionnaires about home factors, including monthly income, language habitually spoken at home, whether the mother was employed, and whether an English-speaking domestic helper resided there. Analyses revealed statistically…

This report examines how immigrant students performed, mainly in mathematics and reading, but also in science and problem-solving skills in the PISA 2003 assessment, both in comparison with native students in their adopted country and relative to other students across all countries covered in the report (the "case countries"). In…

Education aims to enable students not only to acquire knowledge but also to become capable and enthusiastic lifelong learners. Prior research has found that learning is more likely to be effective where a student plays a proactive role in the learning process. Such a proactive process, including learning on students' own initiative and strategies,…