香港中学会考中国语文科及英国语文科水平参照成绩汇报

由2007年开始,香港中学会考中国语文科及英国语文科开始采用水平参照成绩汇报(standards-referenced reporting)。本文以香港中学会考中国语文科及英国语文科水平参照成绩汇报为例,介绍水平参照成绩汇报的特点及采用水平参照成绩汇报的理念,着重讨论如何设定、保持水平,及汇报成绩,并略述水平参照成绩汇报对香港社会的影响以及水平参照成绩汇报的未来发展。     

Assessment of Chemistry Laboratory Classroom Environments

The Science Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI) is a recently developed classroom environment instrument for assessing students' or teachers' perceptions of their science laboratory classroom environment. This paper describes its development and reports on the validation and application of its modified form, the Chemistry Laboratory Environment Inventory (CLEI), with a Singapore secondary school sample. The sample consisted of 1 592 final-year secondary school (i.e. tenth grade) chemistry students from 56 intact classes from 28 randomly selected co-educational government secondary schools in Singapore. Various item and factor analyses supported the reliability and validity of the instrument for assessing students' perceptions of their chemistry laboratory environment specifically in Singapore.     

‘Read a hundred times and the meaning will appear ...’ Changes in Chinese University students’ views of the temporal structure of learning

It has been shown earlier that while some high school students (younger on the average) do not differentiate between memorization and understanding, others (older on the average) do so (Marton, Watkins and Tang, Learning and Instruction 7, 21–48, 1997). Those who do differentiate impose a sequential ordering on the two: When you learn you memorize first and understand subsequently or When you learn you understand first and memorize later. This sequential ordering is expressed both through the students account of their theory of learning and their account of their own study practices. In the current study a group of 20 students of an elite University in mainland China were interviewed about learning, memorization and understanding in the context of their studies upon entering the University and 1.5 years later. It was found that while on the first occasion the predominant mode of talking about memorization and understanding was by discussing them in terms of either of the two above ways of sequentially ordering them. On the second occasion the most frequent way of talking about memorization and understanding was in terms of two simultaneous events, simply two different aspects of the very same learning process. The students spoke about using both repetition and variation in their study practice at the same time. Unlike when you read the same presentation of something several times in the same way and thus repeat the same thing again and again, when you read different presentations of the same thing or when you read the same presentation in different ways, something is repeated and something is varied. To the extent that repetition enhances remembering and variation enhances understanding – as the students seem to believe – they will likely remember that which is repeated and understand that which is varied. And when the two are intertwined they will remember what they understand.     

Primary leiomyosarcoma of the nipple-areola complex： Report of a case and review of literature

Primary leiomyosarcoma of the nipple-areola complex is extremely rare. Less than ten such cases have been reported in English literature so far. Herein we describe a 52-year-old female presenting with a 1.5 cm× 1.1 cm×0.7 cm nodular lesion over her left nipple, and leiomyosarcoma was proved by pathological examination of the excised specimen. Positron emitted tomogram (PET) revealed no abnormal signal other than the primary site. Microscopically, this poorly circumscribed tumor was composed of interlacing bundles of smooth muscle cells with bizarre and pleomorphic nuclei, as well as prominent nucleoli. Its mitotic count was up to 7 mitoses per 10 high power fields (HPF). Immunohistochemical study of tumor cells revealed positive stain for α-smooth muscle actin and vimentin; and negative for cytokeratin, CD34 and S-100. Left simple mastectomy was undertaken and no residual mass lesion was noted on the resected specimen. Related literatures about the diagnosis and treatment for breast leiomyosarcoma will be presented here.     

The comparative efficacy of two approaches to teaching sixth graders opinion essay writing

Children in sixth grade randomly assigned to a teacher-made writing procedure anchored in the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model and training procedures were predicted to surpass children assigned to the comparison condition on dependent measures of writing clarity, organization, and cogency. The prediction was generally substantiated. The results suggest that the rate of change among individual children in the SRSD condition was faster than among children in the comparison condition on measures of clarity and organization. On the measure of cogency, findings showed that the rate of change among individuals in the SRSD condition compared to the comparison condition approached but did not reach statistical significance. Variance in growth parameters on the measure of writing clarity was statistically significant; however on the measure of organization, there was no substantive variation in individual growth parameters. Social validity data from all the children and teachers indicated the training was well received. The results are taken to support the efficacy of the SRSD model and training procedures.     

Cross‐cultural Validation of Models of Approaches to Learning: an application of confirmatory factor analysis

Six structural equation models were tested by analysing responses to the Learning Process Questionnaire of 10 samples of primary and secondary school students from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Beijing, Hong Kong and Canada. Confirmatory factor analyses provided general support for the cross‐cultural within‐construct validity of the questionnaire. As predicted, the dimensions of deep and surface approaches to learning received cross‐cultural support, but the positioning of the achieving dimension varied across cultures. This is in line with the notion that students who adopt an achieving approach will adopt different strategies which will be likely to maximise their achievement according to particular course and teacher characteristics.     

Enhancing English among second language learners: the pre‐school years

Informed by knowledge of linguistics, research findings in the areas of monolingual and bilingual acquisition, dyslexia and speech therapy clinical practice, five factors are proposed to argue that the acquisition of English by young non‐native learners can be enhanced by learning activities which take into account factors of developmental sequence in language acquisition, language‐specific properties, the relationship between oral and written language, the what‐to‐learn‐first issue and the quality of the language input. Proper language goals can be set and appropriate activities designed, only if the language input provider interacts with a learner in a concrete activity while being sensitive to the developmental trajectory of monolingual speaking children, the development of the less dominant language in a bilingual child, the prosodic and phonological differences between the learner's mother tongue and the target language, the importance of phonological awareness which defines dyslexia, the use of non‐abstract language structures grounded in concrete lexical items in the early stage of language acquisition and the strategy of expanding learners' utterance by one element as used in speech therapy.     

Common causes of maladjustment in our school pupils

In the past few years, there has been a tremendous upsurge of interest in children with emotional and behavioural problems. New units, clinics and agencies have been set up by the government and by the statutory bodies and voluntary organisations in the community to help these children overcome their problems. Much publicity has been given to the provision of assessment, counselling and preventive services but so little to how effective these services are. Why is this so? I suspect that there may be problems relating to our capacity to elucidate the causes of the child's problems correctly. Of course there may be problems relating to the competency of the staff in giving the right sort of assistance to the child; but sound treatment must be based on a good understanding of how the child's problems come about in the first place.     

Do bilingual children read words better in lists or in context?

The aim of this study was to determine whether 11-year-old children in Singapore, from English Dominant or English Non-Dominant backgrounds, read better orally when words were presented in list or text. The children read words in passage and in list form presented in counterbalanced order. In a study of good, average and poor readers, Nicholson (1991) found that context was of more benefit to poorer readers and to younger readers. With the English Non-Dominant readers in the present study regarded as less proficient readers of English, these children should be expected to show the greatest gains from passage presentations. Error analyses showed that English Non-Dominant readers performed less well in list readings relative to text readings, while the English Dominant readers produced no difference in performance for these conditions. This indicates that readers with less exposure to English relied more on contextual information than the more experienced readers. Thus, Goodman's (1965) idea of enlightened guessing was again questioned in this study for the case of bilingual readers. Additionally, reading miscues were found to vary in type according to whether the same words were being read in list or in context.     

高等职业技术教育办学模式及人才培养特色的探讨

从发展高等职业教育这个“热点”和“摊点”入手,借鉴国外几所大学的办学模式及其特点经验,分析了我国发展高等职业教育的几种办学模式及其特点,从而提高了对高等职业教育人才培养转包的认识和办好高等职业教育的自觉性。