Background of this Research

I Key issues

• Ethnic minority students comprise 2% of the Hong Kong school population but they are not represented in either senior secondary or higher education (Census and Statistics Department, 2007).

 

• This lack of participation is a serious social issue but it is also political. In July 2008 the Legislative Council passed Hong Kong’s first anti-racial discrimination ordinance (RDO) that signaled for the first time in local legislation the legal recognition and enforcement of the rights of ethnic minorities.

 

• In order to address the social and political issues associated with ethnic minority participation in Hong Kong schools, this research will investigate the barriers to ethnic minority participation. In particular, it will focus on the way classroom assessment environments have the potential to either include or exclude students from successful schooling. The classroom assessment environment focuses on “the way teachers communicate their expectations to students and the way they provide feedback as to how well these expectations are met…(thus) help(ing) students form concepts of what is important to learn and how (Brookhart and De Voge, 1999, p.409).

 

• Such research will broaden traditional concerns with mainstream ethnically dominant Chinese students. This is not meant to undervalue the importance of Chinese students who form 98% of Hong Kong’s school population. Rather, it recognizes the multicultural nature of Hong Kong’s schooling system.

 

• Despite the presence of ethnic minority groups in Hong Kong there is not a policy on multiculturalism or multicultural education that signals in a public way support for diversity and difference. Indeed, Chinese societies tend to place more emphasis on social harmony than on difference ( Tyler, Kramer, & Oliver, 1998 ). Supporting difference in the classroom, therefore, maybe more problematic than it often seems to be in the West.

 

• A significant amount of literature on learning and assessment in Hong Kong contexts has focused on Chinese students (Watkins and Biggs (1996), Brown et al., (in press), Mok , Cheng, Moore, & Kennedy, 2006). In general, this literature indicates that there are Chinese cultural norms governing both the learning behavior of students and the expectations of their teachers. Given an emergent multiculturalism, a key issue is how these traditional Chinese cultural norms are modified for multicultural classes and how they impact on ethnic minority students and their progress through the education system.

 

 

 

References

Brockhart, S and DeVoge, J. (1999). Applied Measurement in Education, 12 (4), 409-425.

Brown, G., Kennedy, K., Fok, PK., Chan, JKS. & Yu, WM. (in press). Assessment for improvement: Understanding Hong Kong teachers’ conceptions and practices of assessment. Assessment in Education.

Census and Statistics Department (2007). 2006 population by-census. Thematic report: Ethnic minorities. Hong Kong: The Author.

Mok, M. M. C., Cheng, Y. C., Moore, P. J., Kennedy, K. J. (2006). The Development and Validation of the Self-Learning Scales (SLS). Journal of Applied Measurement, 7 (4), 418-449.

Tyler, T., Kramer. R. & Oliver, J. (1998). The Psychology of the Social Self. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Watkins, D. & Biggs, J. (1996). The Chinese Learner:Cultural, Psychological and Contextual Influences.Hong Kong and Melbourne: Comparative Education Research Centre and the Australian Council for Educational Research.

 

 

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