To enhance understanding of factors that may improve students' STEM career participation, we explored Hong Kong secondary students' self-perceptions of STEM subjects and career interests using the STEM Semantic Survey and Career Interest Survey questionnaire. Results showed that most students thought technology was more appealing than science,…

This paper reported an exploratory study that examined secondary school students' understanding of collaborative discourse in a computer-supported knowledge building environment in characterizing and scaffolding their engagement in productive online discourse. The participants were thirty-eight secondary school students in a visual arts course. A…

Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes students' collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Advancing the frontiers of community knowledge is an exciting but challenging process, especially for low-achieving students, because it involves a continuous experience of cognitive disequilibrium and…

It is well established that COVID-19 pandemic is associated with arousal of feelings of hopelessness and negativity in adolescents regarding future career development outcomes. However, the current literature has yet to clarify the roles teacher social support play in facilitating students' positive career development during the pandemic. This…

While the relationship between self-determination and the academic achievement of students has been widely tested across cultures and groups, limited research has examined the antecedents of self-determination and their impacts on school engagement, which is the pre-requisite of academic achievement. The present study, based on the self-system…

Although research has always related e-portfolios to self-regulated learning, recently agency, which includes individual, relational, and contextual domains, has also been highlighted. Likewise, agency has been explored in technological environments that support collaborative and co-design learning processes. This study, investigating the…

Students nowadays grow up with electronic devices and are adept at navigating the virtual world. Practical activities may be more of a novelty for them than simulations. Using the topic of electric circuits as a context, we examined the ways in which Grade 11 students perceived and learned from practical work and simulations, respectively. In this…

This paper reports on an interview study of 18 Grade 10-12 students' model-based reasoning of a chemical reaction: the reaction of magnesium and oxygen at the submicro level. It has been proposed that chemical reactions can be conceptualised using two models: (i) the "particle model," in which a reaction is regarded as the simple…

Serious gaming has been regarded as one of the important student-centric learning approaches in the coming decade. However, there has been a lack of in-depth discussion of the teacher role in the course of serious gaming when it is adopted in formal schooling. The study discussed in this paper is a piece of two-cycle design-based research,…

This paper proposes a model-based notion of "submicro representations of chemical reactions". Based on three structural models of matter (the simple particle model, the atomic model and the free electron model of metals), we suggest there are two major models of reaction in school chemistry curricula: (a) reactions that are simple…

Critical thinking has gained much attention in many countries over the past few decades; however, there is no clear definition of what it is due to the richness in meaning of the term 'critical thinking' and the ambiguity of the word 'critical'. In spite of this, many scholars had contributed their conceptions of critical thinking, in which…

This study investigated whether and how students with low prior achievement can carry out and benefit from reflective assessment supported by the Knowledge Connections Analyzer (KCA) to collaboratively improve their knowledge-building discourse. Participants were a class of 20 Grade 11 students with low achievement taking visual art from an…

International schools provide a unique context for examining the influence of culture on adolescent personality and identity. In order to investigate whether intercultural education attenuates or amplifies known cultural differences in personality, the traits of 81 students from Chinese, North American, and mixed Chinese-North American cultural…

The integration of popular culture into English language learning has recently been formalised in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary curriculum, with the development of critical reading indicated as one of the key objectives. Whether and how students respond to popular culture texts is, however, under-researched. The present paper reports findings…

This study applied an unconventional use of past examination papers by converting questions into hands-on experiments for students. Students in an experimental group were engaged in use of those experiments while the remainder attended conventional lectures with written practice. The results reflect that the experimental group positively improved…