Tag: EdUHK

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France, The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) and Université Paris Cité jointly initiated and organised the ‘International Conference on Chinese Linguistics and History of Chinese Language Education’. The conference was also one of the events celebrating the 30th anniversary of EdUHK.

The event was held on 13 and 14 June at Université Paris Cité in France, and was co-hosted by the Association Recherche et Enseignement du Chinois (AREC), the Department of Chinese Language Studies at EdUHK, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilisations at Université Paris Cité, and the Confucius Institute at Université Paris Cité, based on the Hong Kong-France Joint Project (ANR-RGC: CLDA) ‘Language Contact and Areal Diffusion of Sinitic Languages in the GBA’. The conference was attended by more than 70 scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China and around the globe, to discuss the latest research findings in Chinese linguistics, Chinese language education and Chinese culture.

The Hong Kong Principal Investigator (PI) of the CLDA project, Dr Wang Cong from the Department of Chinese Language Studies at EdUHK, and the France PI, Dr Qi Chong from Université Paris Cité and the Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, served as the organising committee chairs for the conference. They presented the CLDA project’s significant interim findings, which captured widespread attention and stimulated heated discussion among the international scholars.

Professor John Lee Chi-Kin, Director of Academy for Applied Policy Studies and Education Futures at EdUHK, Chair Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at EdUHK, and UNESCO Chair in Regional Education Development and Lifelong Learning, delivered a keynote speech entitled ‘An initial exploration of the concepts and educational implications related to Zhongyong’. He analysed different translations of Zhongyong in the English-speaking world since the 19th century.

Professor John Erni, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Chair Professor of the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at EdUHK, delivered a keynote speech entitled ‘Popular fantastic novels and middle-class enhancement in China’. Professor Erni focused on the phenomenon of the transnational flow of Western popular fiction into China and explored how these literary works reshaped the Chinese middle class. The speech prompted keen interest and in-depth exchanges of ideas regarding the influence of Western literature and culture on Chinese society among all scholars and students at the conference.

Several faculty members from the Department of Chinese Language Studies at EdUHK delivered invited speeches and academic paper reports. Doctoral student Dai Yanmei, who was awarded the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) in 2024, and Zhu Sida, a 2022 EdD graduate currently serving as a lecturer at a renowned mainland Chinese university, presented their latest research findings.

The Department of Education Policy and Leadership (EPL) at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), in collaboration with the School of Education at the University of Southampton, UK, hosted an international conference on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Education on 4 May 2024: the first of its kind in Hong Kong.

The Conference entitled, “Impact for Educational Equity: Dialogues and Pathways for Diversity and Inclusion”, is part of EdUHK’s year-long 30th Anniversary celebrations. It aims to elevate research, teaching and scholarship in policy and leadership for the advancement of EDI in education.

There were almost 100 participants at the conference, which was the result of the strategic collaboration between EPL and the School of Education at the University of Southampton, which began last year.

Participants included colleagues from the Hong Kong Education Bureau, the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), schools, corporations, NGOs, civil society organisations, the media, and colleagues and students from EdUHK, as well as sister universities in Hong Kong and Macau. A wide range of participants was invited, and an equitable and inclusive space was provided to ensure meaningful dialogue, sharing and learning.

The opening ceremony was officiated by Dr Lu Jiafang, Acting Head of EPL; Ms Linda Lam, Chairperson at EOC in Hong Kong; Professor Chris Brown, Head of Southampton Education School; and Dr Miron Bhowmik, Assistant Professor of EPL and an EDI Specialist at the Faculty of Education and Human Development (FEHD), who also convened the Conference. EdUHK President Professor John Lee Chi-Kin welcomed all participants and highlighted the importance of the conference, as well as explaining EdUHK’s contributions to advancing EDI via research, teaching and service. EOC Chairperson Ms Lam reaffirmed the commission’s role and commitment to promoting EDI ideals in Hong Kong.

The conference included two keynote speeches and four panel discussions featuring speakers including overseas scholars, a UNESCO official, and Hong Kong scholars and practitioners, sparking meaningful dialogue. The conference organisers were grateful to the team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers for their support at the conference.

During the closing ceremony, both institutions affirmed their commitment to continuing their collaboration for the advancement of EDI in education.

The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) secured three awards at the 3rd Asia Innovation and Invention Exhibition (AEII). This is the first time EdUHK has entered inventions at the AEII, and the three projects presented captured the attention of industry experts.

The AEII, Asia’s annual exhibition and competition dedicated to showcasing innovations and inventions from the region, took place between 7 and 8 December 2023 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The exhibition was held by the Hong Kong Exporters’ Association partnered with Palexpo, the organiser of the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva. The event featured over 110 inventions vying for 46 awards.

EdUHK’s groundbreaking ‘Rapid Quantification of Microplastics Using Total Organic Carbon Analysis with Simple Sample Pretreatment\’ project was awarded a gold medal, impressing the judges with its ingenuity and potential for real-world impact. Additionally, the University received silver medals in the food safety and healthcare technology categories, for inventions which further the development of scientific and technological knowledge.

Award-winning Projects

Project Name	Principal Investigator(s)	Description	Medal
Rapid Quantification of Microplastics Using Total Organic Carbon Analysis with Simple Sample Pretreatment	Dr Tsang Yiu-fai, Associate Professor at the Department of Science and Environmental Studies	An all-in-one semi-automatic sample pre-treatment device that can efficiently and accurately quantify microplastic abundance in water and slug samples.	Gold Medal
Nano-Sensor System for Meat and Seafood Monitoring	Professor Stephen Chow Cheuk-fai, Professor (Practice) at the Department of Science and Environmental Studies	A food monitoring device that offers a new and convenient way to monitor food safety, with a series of chemo sensors to detect the chemical substance released from rotting food.	Silver Medal
An Intelligent Ocular Misalignment Measurement System	Dr Fu Hong, Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology	This fully automated machine measures ocular misalignment, with enormous potential to help mitigate the shortage of eye professionals and provide an objective method with high granular measurement.	Silver Medal

Dr Kevin Chan Ka-shing, Head of Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, has been elected as a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for his outstanding contribution to psychological science.

Dr Chan is a psychologist who studies the impact of stigma on the health and wellbeing of social minorities. His recent work focuses on examining stigma experienced by individuals with mental disorders and families of children with developmental disabilities. By investigating how stigma affects these disadvantaged populations and developing targeted interventions to address it, Dr Chan’s research aims to improve their wellbeing and promote equity and inclusion.

“I am deeply grateful for being elected as a Fellow of the APS. This accomplishment would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my students, research assistants and collaborators,” said Dr Chan. “I will continue to promote the reduction of stigma and advocate for social justice through my research and knowledge transfer.”

The APS is the global scientific home for over 25,000 leading researchers, practitioners, teachers and students in the field of psychological science, spanning across all continents. Its aim is to advance scientific psychology beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries. The status of Fellow is awarded to APS members who have consistently made exceptional contributions to the field of psychology through research, teaching, service and practical application.

The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) announced the establishment of a new collaborative research network with the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL) – an institution which has been recognised as the top-ranked institution in the discipline of Education & Training by the QS World University Rankings every year since 2014.

With the aim of fostering intellectual dialogue and promoting innovative research on critical issues in education, the network will leverage the unique strengths and expertise of both universities to advance theoretical understanding and practical applications in various fields, particularly in language and education.

Under the new network, a wide range of research topics will be explored, including intercultural communication, translanguaging, family language policy, language and identity, well-being, technology-assisted/digital learning and teaching, and teacher education. The network will provide an inclusive platform for researchers, education practitioners, policy makers, and research students to engage in critical discourse, generate new knowledge, and contribute to the advancement of global education.

The team from IOE, UCL will be co-led by Professor John O\’Regan, Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics and Vice-Dean (International). The team from EdUHK will be co-led by Dean of Graduate School Professor Michelle Gu Mingyue and President Professor John Lee Chi-Kin. Serving as advisers will be experts and scholars from both universities, including Professor Angel Lin Mei-yi, Chair Professor of Language, Literacy, and Social Semiotics in Education from EdUHK.

Professor John Lee said, “I firmly believe that this collaboration will not only enrich the academic communities of both universities, but also have a profound impact on education research and practices worldwide.”

Professor Keith Ho Wing-kei, Acting Head of the Department of Science and Environmental Studies, has been named in the 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list released by Clarivate Analytics. This is the sixth consecutive year Professor Ho has been named on the list, which charts the world’s most influential researchers. Those on the list have demonstrated exceptional performance by producing multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citation for their field. In 2023, only 6,849 researchers in 20 research areas, across multiple fields and from over 67 countries and regions, have earned this exclusive distinction.

Professor Ho was also named among the top 2% most-cited scientists in the world in the latest annual list published by Stanford University. He ranked 43rd in 2022 out of nearly 39,000 physical chemistry scholars, demonstrating the high citation rate and significant impact of his research output.

The full 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list can be found here.

The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) has won four awards including its first-ever Gold Medal at the International Trade Fair “Ideas-Inventions-New Products” 2023, held in Nuremberg, Germany. EdUHK is the only university in Hong Kong to win gold at this year\’s event, making the University’s achievement particularly noteworthy.

iENA serves as a global hotspot for inventors and innovative minds to present their ideas, inventions, and new products. In the 2023 trade fair, held between 28 and 30 October 2023, 500 inventions from 30 countries and regions were showcased.

Dr Steve Mung Wai-yin, Research Assistant Professor of the Research and Development Office won the Gold Medal in the Safety category, with his pioneering ‘Fall Detection System for Smart City’. The University also claimed bronze awards in the Greentech, Chemistry, and EdTech categories, demonstrating its commitment to sustainable and educational innovation.

Award-winning Projects

Project Name	Principal Investigator(s)	Description	Medal
Fall Detection System for Smart City	Dr Steve Mung Wai-yin, Research Assistant Professor at the Research and Development Office	Falling in a private area can mean there is no immediate treatment, which can prove fatal. A smart fall detection system has been developed to detect people’s status in private areas, such as accessible toilets, and prevent delayed treatment. This originated system includes the server and on-site fall detection hardware which are connected by Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology. The hardware includes a microcontroller unit and two thermal sensors. The server can then calculate the data detected by the thermal sensor and send alert signals to the backend user for detection of abnormalities.	Gold Medal
Audio-Tactile Chinese Characters: Bringing Multisensory & Novel Learning Experience to People with Visual Impairment and Special Needs	Dr Hung Keung, Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural and Creative Arts	Chinese radicals in several 3D tactile character models allow students to experience the structural formation of Chinese characters through touch and sound. This multi-sensory learning kit is designed to break visual and social learning barriers, especially for people with visual impairment or special needs.	Bronze Medal
Nano-Sensor System for Meat and Seafood Monitoring	Professor Stephen Chow Cheuk-fai, Professor (Practice) at the Department of Science and Environmental Studies	A food monitoring device that offers a new and convenient way to monitor food safety, with a series of chemo sensors to detect the chemical substance released from rotting food.	Bronze Medal
Rapid Quantification of Microplastics Using Total Organic Carbon Analysis with Simple Sample Pretreatment	Dr Tsang Yiu-fai, Associate Professor at the Department of Science and Environmental Studies	An all-in-one semi-automatic sample pre-treatment device that can efficiently and accurately quantify microplastic abundance in water and slug samples.	Bronze Medal

Thirty-eight scholars of The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) were named among the top 2% most-cited scientists in the world, in the latest annual rankings published by Stanford University, as of October 2023.

Among them were new President Professor John Lee Chi-Kin, who assumed the position last month; Vice President (Research and Development) Professor Chetwyn Chan Che-hin; Advisor and Adjunct Chair Professor (Geography & Environmental Science) Professor Jim Chi-yung, Advisor (Environmental Science) Professor Wong Ming-hung; and Professor Rudolf Wu Shiu-sun, who has invented ‘artificial mussels’, an effective tool that can monitor radioactive contamination in waters around the world.

Compiled by a research team at Stanford University, the rankings list top scientists from a wide range of fields, based on their career-long citation impact or single-year citation impact in 2022.

EdUHK scholars fared well in their respective fields. Notably, Professor Jim Chi-yung, also known as ‘Dr Tree’, ranked first out of over 30,000 scholars in the field of forestry, representing the high citation rate and significant impact of his research output. Professor Wong Ming-hung from the Department of Science and Environmental Studies also ranked 8th out of nearly 100,000 scholars in environmental sciences.

In addition to research capacity and impact, the University has also secured record-high funding of over HK$27 million under the annual Research Grants Council’s General Research Fund and Early Career Scheme. Once again, EdUHK came first, in the discipline of education, both in terms of the number of funded projects and amount awarded. The University has also made significant strides in various disciplines, such as psychology and linguistics, further underscoring its solid foundation in broadening academic scope beyond education.

Congratulating the EdUHK team, President Professor Lee said, “The University has made great strides in research in education and various emerging disciplines, as illustrated by its remarkable achievements over the years. To further extend our research impact in Hong Kong and beyond, we have established two new Academies, namely the Academy for Educational Development and Innovation and the Academy for Applied Policy Studies and Education to better promote interdisciplinary research with greater synergy.”

Learn more: https://www.eduhk.hk/en/features/38-eduhk-scholars-named-world-s-top-2-scientists-by-stanford-university

Past research on Chinese mathematics teaching has focused mainly on the role of teacher’s beliefs and professional knowledge separately in teaching approaches, or examined three variables – teacher’s beliefs, professional knowledge and teaching approaches – in correlational studies. How teaching beliefs and professional knowledge specifically influence teaching approaches remained largely unclear. Also, most studies have focused on pre-service or elementary school teachers in the West. There is a need to know whether these conceptual frameworks can be applied and adapted to the Chinese teaching context at the secondary level.

Dr Zhang Qiaoping, Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Education University of Hong Kong, conducted a study to help fill this research gap by investigating (1) what kind of mathematical knowledge of functions and beliefs mathematics teachers in secondary schools in mainland China have, and (2) how their professional knowledge and beliefs about mathematics affect their teaching approaches.

Phase 1 of the study was a questionnaire given to 92 mathematics teachers to get a picture of their beliefs about mathematics, along with their subject matter knowledge (SMK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) regarding the concept of functions.

In Phase 2, based on the responses in Phase 1, six teachers were selected from three districts to participate in a case study, which examined the teachers’ beliefs about mathematics in terms of their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, mathematics teaching and mathematics learning. The study found that three main beliefs held by the teachers were instrumentalist, Platonist, and problem-solving-oriented.

Regarding the nature of mathematics, over 70% of teachers believed that mathematics is a collection of rules and steps for solving problems. Most teachers believed that learning mathematics was about both getting answers quickly and understanding why solutions were correct. Over 60% of teachers believed that they should cover all topics in the logical order presented in textbooks, and 70% agreed that teaching activities should be challenging for students.

Teachers with weak PCK lacked variation in their teaching methods, while teachers with stronger PCK used textbooks flexibly according to their students’ needs. Their teaching designs were based on practical considerations, and they used many metaphors and analogies to explain concepts.

As for problem-solving, teachers with rich PCK gave counter-examples based on students’ mistakes to deepen their overall understanding; and they encouraged students to engage in classroom activities, allowing them to present their ideas and explore new knowledge.

The teachers’ professional knowledge scores were relatively high for familiar, everyday teaching questions, but very low on questions about unfamiliar functions.

The study concluded that there is a need to emphasise the integration of teachers’ professional knowledge with their mathematical beliefs, and that it is important to know what beliefs teachers hold about both the nature of mathematics and mathematics teaching, and how these beliefs influence their teaching.

Most research on the association between visual skills and reading has focused on how visual skills facilitate reading. But learning to read Chinese involves both visual skills and mapping between print and sound. It is not clear how their association develops in later stages. This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading.

Dr Melody Pan Jinger, Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, and her research team included in their study (1) Cross Out, a speeded task that involves visual processing of nonalphanumeric stimuli; (2) Visual Matching, a speeded task which involves visual processing of numeric stimuli; and (3) numeric Rapid Automatised Naming, a speeded task which requires visual processing and oral output. Stimuli used in the Cross Out task are not verbally codable, whereas those used in the Visual Matching and Rapid Automatised Naming tasks are. Visual Matching does not require verbal output, while Rapid Automatised Naming does. These differences allowed us to investigate how phonological processing modulates the relationship between speeded visual processing and word reading.

The study tested 293 Chinese children on nonverbal IQ at age 4, phonological and morphological awareness at age 5, Cross Out and Visual Matching at ages 6 to 8, and Rapid Automatised Naming and Character Recognition at ages 5 to 9 to measure their reading accuracy.

The results found that children’s Character Recognition at ages 6 and 7 predicted Cross Out at ages 7 and 8. There was a cross-lagged relationship between Character Recognition and Visual Matching from ages 6 to 7, but Character Recognition at age 7 significantly predicted Visual Matching from age 7 to 8. Rapid Automatised Naming and Character Recognition predicted each other from ages 5 to 6, but only Rapid Automatised Naming predicted subsequent Character Recognition from ages 6 to 9.

Learning to read Chinese requires substantial visual processing. However, the findings of the study also highlighted the importance of reading skill for the development of children’s visual skills, irrespective of the type of visual stimuli.

The results extended previous findings by showing that visual processing can be improved by learning to read. It also suggested that the reciprocal relationship between visual processing and reading depends on the age and the type of stimuli of the visual processing task.

The findings reflected the development of reading Chinese. In the logographic stage, children tend to recognise characters based mostly on their visual features. Recognising Chinese characters, which are far more complex than the alphabet, helps children develop their visual skills. But in the cipher phase, children need to rely on decoding. Though Chinese is an opaque script, children still rely on phonological information in the early years of primary school. The association between visual codes and phonological codes, as reflected in Rapid Automatised Naming and in later ages in the Visual Matching task, are important for Chinese children in learning to read.

The study concluded that the relationship between Chinese character recognition and tasks involving speeded visual processing differ largely depending on age and whether alphanumeric stimuli and phonological processing are involved. Learning to read Chinese appears to facilitate early two-dimensional, geometric, pure (non-print-related) visual processing, but visual processing appears to promote subsequent reading of Chinese only when it involves alphanumeric print. This pattern is likely attributable in part to the development and specialisation of print recognition over time and partly to the involvement of explicit phonological coding in the process.

The study was conducted together with Dr Cui Xin and Professor Shu Hua from Beijing Normal University, and Professor Catherine McBride from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

To learn more about the study, please click here.