Kwok Tung Tsui

Understanding the academic and career aspirations of adolescents and their destinations could inform policy makers and educators about how best to provide support at society and school levels to facilitate adolescents transitioning from school to further education and work. The current qualitative study investigates seven senior secondary students from three schools with varying intakes of student ability under the “Secondary School Places Allocation System” in Hong Kong. By employing a Systems Theory Framework, the study looked into the academic and career aspirations of these students and tracked their destinations immediately after secondary school graduation. Findings show that the academic and career aspirations of adolescents and their destinations are shaped by prevailing preferences for attaining higher qualifications, preferably a bachelor’s degree, parental and others’ influences, and outcomes of public examination results. The implications of enhancing support for the societal, school, and career- and life-planning education of individuals are discussed.

Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology is a peer-reviewed international journal, which publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.

This article aims to evaluate the alignment between subject learning outcomes (SLOs) that represent the role of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (C&I) and the course curricula documents. Content analysis was conducted to map SLOs in the curricula documents of a set of compulsory courses offered by the department of C&I. A hermeneutic perspective was adopted by four academic staff members who were involved in the mapping process, which considers curriculum scrutiny as an opportunity of reflective dialog. Findings suggest that though SLOs were adequately addressed in courses offered in various programs, the coverage and depth of studying SLOs may differ in different programs, such as Bachelor of Education and Post Graduate Diploma in Education. In this study, curriculum mapping was facilitated by deliberative dialog among participants, which made the mapping exercise a validating professional development activity. Implications are discussed. Recommendations regarding curriculum evaluation and teacher training are similarly suggested.

Content analysis has been used to conduct curriculum mapping to map the course objectives, course content, and the assessment tasks of 14 compulsory courses, onto the five Subject Learning Objective (SLO) factors of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction (DC&I) in a teacher education institution in Hong Kong. The results show that the SLO factors appear either as a cluster or a concentrated whole in the courses, suggesting a connective nature and dominated feature among them. The situation can be explained by the planned integrated learning experience as well as emphasis on specific SLO factors in response to change in educational context. Comparison of the coverage of SLO factors in the Bachelor of Education (BEd) and Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) is performed. The results suggest that the BEd program by design has more curriculum space for students to achieve this set of SLO factors than of the PGDE. It takes advantage of more curriculum space to adopt a spiral curriculum to facilitate complex learning in a logical progression. The study recommends that curriculum mapping is a useful tool to evaluate the extent to which the courses offered by an academic department are in alignment with its agreed SLOs. The methodologies can be used in other educational settings. Implications are made to enhance curriculum planning of teacher education programs

Traditional studies of teacher commitment often ignore the effect of interactions between personal characteristics and school environment and the implications of their findings are inevitably limited. Responding to this research gap, the present study aims to investigate the contingency relationship of school organizational health to teacher commitment with multi-level statistical analysis. The study was a survey involving 20 aided primary schools and 423 teachers in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that three school organizational health factors such as morale, consideration and institutional integrity are related to teacher commitment through interactions with the teacher personal characteristics such as position, marital status, and length of service in the school. The result supports that the relationship between school organizational health and teacher commitment is contingent upon teacher characteristics. The interesting findings can provide implications for school improvement and future research.

A new conception of teacher effectiveness research in this article includes 7 models: (a) goal and task—emphasizes teachers' personal achievement goals and tasks and school goals; (b) resource utilization—requires teachers' effective use and procuration of school resources to achieve goals; (c) process—stresses teachers' contribution to effective teaching and school process; (d) school constituencies satisfaction—expects teachers to meet the needs of their students, parents, school, and community; (e) accountability—focuses on teachers' accountability and professional reputation; (f) absence of problems—requires teachers to identify and avoid potential problems, weakness, dysfunction, and crises; and (g) continuous learning—emphasizes teachers' awareness of environmental changes and continuous improvement and development.

Based on the conception of total teacher effectiveness, aims to develop strategies for conceptualizing teacher effectiveness research. From the new conception, the units of research on teacher effectiveness are cell, array and layer. The strategies advanced for conceptualizing research include the individual unit description strategies, the within‐layer relationship strategies, the between‐layer relationship strategies, and the whole structure strategy. Based on the conception strategies, teacher effectiveness research can be shifted from traditional simplistic one‐dimensional conception to sophisticated multidimensional conception and can have various research alternatives for different research purposes and contexts. Hopefully, these strategies can provide a new direction for studying and improving teacher effectiveness in particular and school effectiveness in general.