Tag: EdUHK

A large body of research supports the critical role of handwriting in reading, both in alphabetic languages and Chinese. Studies of alphabetic languages found that handwriting practice facilitates early letter categorisation ability.

In the study by Dr Amelia Xu Zhengye, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Special Education and Counselling (SEC), The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character-learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components including visual, motor and haptic systems, of handwriting to Chinese character learning. There were three sessions in the study: pretest, training, and posttest. The pretest was performed two weeks before the training and the posttest was conducted immediately after the training session.

After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of cognitive-linguistic skills, each child was assigned to one of four training conditions (i.e., reading, visual processing, air-writing, or handwriting) to investigate the specific contributions of sensory-motor components of handwriting to Chinese character learning. In the reading condition, the children were shown images of characters. In the other three conditions, they were shown animations of how a given character is written. The participants were asked to view the animations in the visual processing condition, whereas in the air-writing and handwriting conditions they were asked, respectively, to follow the animations and write the Chinese characters with their index fingers in the air or write the Chinese characters with a pen on paper. They were asked to name the learnt characters in the posttest.

Both air-writing and handwriting elicited a larger training effect than reading or visual processing, but there was no difference between the air-writing and handwriting groups. Also, no age differences were found in either the air-writing or handwriting conditions.

Overall, the children in the air-writing and handwriting groups performed better than those in the reading (control) and visual processing groups, but there was no significant difference between air-writing and handwriting, nor between reading and visual processing.

First, the visual-processing condition, displaying characters with their stroke-order information, did not provide any extra benefit over the control condition displaying the overall shape. Second, both the air-writing and handwriting conditions provided greater enhancements than the reading condition, suggesting that participating had a better learning effect than passive viewing. Third, the difference between air-writing and visual processing was significant, implying that the specific movements related to orthographic formation have a unique contribution to the relationship between writing and reading. Finally, the similar training effects of the handwriting and air-writing conditions suggest that the haptic processing of handwriting per se did not lead to any unique reading improvement.

The study provides a direction for researchers and educators to examine how to use the different sensory-motor components of handwriting in learning and teaching practice to enhance the effectiveness of Chinese character learning.

The study was conducted together with Dr Liu Duo, Associate Professor at SEC, EdUHK; and Professor Joshi R. Malatesha at Texas A&M University.

As physical activity (PA) has significant benefits for health and fitness, the WHO recommends that children and adults engage at least 60 minutes and 150 minutes of moderate-intensity PA per week, respectively. However, owing to global urbanisation, technological advances, and increasing convenience in daily activities, inadequate PA in all aspects of life has become a major public health concern. In Hong Kong, 71% of adults do not meet the WHO PA recommendations.

This persistent and growing health-related problem indicates an urgent need to develop an intervention programme that can effectively promote PA at the individual, family, community, and city-wide levels. Therefore, a set of community-based family ‘holistic health’ intervention programmes were developed, implemented, and evaluated in the previous Happy Family Kitchen Movement (HFKM) project to promote well-being and health in Hong Kong.

Dr Henry Ho Chun-yip, Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, conducted a study to integrate positive psychology concepts with PA and healthy eating in the programmes. The results of the study provided support for overall intervention effectiveness on well-being outcomes, including family harmony, subjective happiness, and mental quality of life. This article reports findings on the physical health outcomes of the positive physical activity (PPA) intervention from the HFKM to examine its effectiveness for promoting PA and fitness among families.

In the study, a PPA intervention was developed to promote physical activity and fitness among Hong Kong families. PPA utilises positive affective attitudes to circumvent barriers to health behaviour change by helping families associate feelings of enjoyment with physical activity. Zero-Time Exercise (ZTEx) was introduced and promoted as a foot-in-the-door approach.

Using a community-based collaborative approach, the research team worked with social service organisations, a government department, and schools to implement a cluster randomised controlled crossover trial at a citywide scale. A total of 1,983 eligible participants from 1,467 families were recruited from all 18 districts in Hong Kong. Data were collected using structured questionnaires and physical fitness assessments at pre-intervention and one- and three-month follow-up.

PPA was effective in increasing individual ZTEx and ZTEx with family members at one-and three-month follow-up and in improving balance and endurance at three-month follow-up. Within-group improvements were also observed in PPA for ZTEx, ZTEx with family members, balance, and endurance. The qualitative results provided further support for the intervention effectiveness and added in-depth insight into the participants’ motivational, interpersonal, and affective experiences associated with PA after participating in the programme.

The results shed light on the intervention’s effectiveness for PA and fitness, and demonstrated that the community-based collaborative approach is successful in engaging the relevant stakeholders in an active and fruitful partnership with effective capacity building for programme development.

The study was conducted together with Professor Lam Tai-hing at the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong.

To learn more about the study, please click here.

The Education University of Hong Kong has received four silver medals and two bronze at the 48th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva in March 2022. The exhibition is a renowned event to showcase innovations and inventions from all over the world. The award-winning inventions cover a variety of areas: behavioural and cognitive therapy, music education, environmental detection, image captioning and product search engines.

Silver Medals

1. A New Generation of Dissolved Oxygen Sensor Using Replaceable Photo-sensing Film

• Principal investigator: Professor Rudolf Wu Shiu-sun, Advisor (Environmental Science), Department of Science and Environmental Studies
• A novel device which detects and keeps a permanent record of the dissolved oxygen (DO) level in a medium using replaceable photo-sensing film. It is unaffected by biofouling, thus providing a cost-effective method of DO monitoring over large bodies of water.

2. Integrated Intelligent Intervention (3i)-Learning System

• Principal investigator: Student Victor Wong Chun-man, Doctor of Education programme
• A distance-learning system combining AI and Internet of Things, which supports carers to conduct Applied Behaviour Analysis therapies for students with special educational needs.

3. Reimagining Music Learning with e-Orch

• Principal investigator: Dr Leung Chi-hin, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Creative Arts
• A system consists of an app and a cloud-based software, which specifically designed for music performance and composition. Integrated with the patented Grid Notation, virtual instruments and AI music generator, the innovation makes music education accessible and inclusive.

4. UNISON: Unpaired Cross-lingual Image Captioning

• Principal investigator: Professor Philip Yu Leung-ho, Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT)
• An innovative AI system which generates cross-lingual (English to Chinese) image captions without relying on any paired caption corpus. The system consists of two phases: (i) a cross-lingual auto-encoding process and (ii) a cross-modal unsupervised feature mapping, which can perform real-time image to text conversion.

Bronze Medals

5. Lighten Dementia Game Set (Donut, Tea Bag, Fly)

• Principal investigator: Alumna Christine Chan Ka-kei, Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Primary) programme
• A game-based training set specially designed for elderly with dementia in Asian communities. The training set fosters social engagement among elders through Cognitive Stimulation Therapy, which helps slow down the progression of dementia and maintain cognitive functions.

6. Shopgrouper – An Online Product Search Engine that Creates Intelligent Personalised Shopping Experience

• Principal investigator: Alumni Dicky Kwok Wing-cheung and Lam Yick-sun, Bachelor of Education (Honours) (Secondary) – Information and Communication Technology programme, and Dr Henry So Chi-fuk, Senior Lecturer, MIT
• An e-commerce product search engine with an AI product categorisation system. It enhances shopping experience by crawling products data from online shops and offering precise recommendations to consumer. The merchant-customer matching feature also makes shopping more convenient.

Hong Kong is a multilingual society, but nearly 90% of the population speak Cantonese as a first language. Cantonese is used in both formal and informal settings. Many non-local people living and working in Hong Kong therefore need to learn Cantonese in order to integrate themselves into the local community.

Despite its dominant status, however, Cantonese has never been formalised and implemented into the school curriculum. Consequently, learning and teaching materials and teaching methods vary considerably.

Dr Andy Chin Chi-on, Head and Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), proposed a research programme adopting a more scientific and objective approach to promote the learning and teaching Cantonese.

Studies in the past five decades have enriched our understanding of the lexicon, phonology and grammar of Cantonese; yet some deeper issues, such as pragmatics, semantics and discourse, remain to be explored. This kind of research requires a significant amount of authentic and natural language data. The research team thus proposed the construction of a Cantonese corpus to expand the scope of Cantonese linguistic research.

One major advantage of using corpus in language studies is the provision of objective, unbiased quantitative and qualitative data for research and other applications, including the compilation of language materials and natural language processing, such as speech-to-text and text-to-speech algorithms.

The research project started in 2011 with the support of an EdUHK internal research grant and the Early Career Scheme of the Research Grants Council. Dr Chin constructed the corpus in two phases with a size of about one million Chinese characters. The corpus data was collected by transcribing the dialogues of 80 black-and-white movies produced between the 1950s and 1970s, and is now available online.

The corpus won the Gold Medal and Special Award at the Silicon Valley International Invention Festival in 2019. Dr Chin has also developed mobile apps containing the corpus data.

The CanPro app, which enables learners to practise Cantonese pronunciation through commonly used expressions in the corpus, won a Silver Medal at the 2021 Inventions Geneva Evaluation Days.

Another mobile app called ‘Learn Cantonese with Big Data’, supported by the Language Fund of the Standing Committee on Language Education and Research, was launched in March 2022. One major feature of this app is the provision of linguistic information that Cantonese learners might find relevant and useful, such as the collocation of verb-noun, classifier-noun structures, which cannot be obtained without corpus data.

Recent studies have demonstrated that character strengths, including a group of individual characteristics that have moral value and lead to ‘good virtues,’ play a crucial role in students’ participation in society and achievement of success.

Kindness, which is a significant aspect of character strength, has been considered essential for school programmes to improve students’ mental health and foster positive well-being.

As a key social context, schools influence students’ academic, psychological, and social well-being, providing mastery of knowledge and shaping their whole-person development. Numerous studies have highlighted the social aspects of school functions and recognised the effects of schooling on students’ academic and psychological outcomes.

A study conducted by Dr Huang Jing, Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, used multilevel structural equation modeling to explore the relationships between students’ sense of school belonging, perceptions of school kindness, and character strength of kindness.

It included 1,973 students (55.2% girls) in 29 local secondary schools, aged from 13 and 17. Since gender differences in students’ character strengths and perceptions of the school climate have been found in previous studies, the secondary purpose of the study was to examine possible differences in the study constructs across gender groups.

The study tested four sets of hypotheses: (1) Students’ sense of school belonging at the between- and within-school levels are positively correlated with their perceptions of school kindness; (2) students’ sense of school belonging at the between- and within-school levels are positively associated with character strength of kindness; (3) students’ perceptions of school kindness at the between- and within-school levels are positively associated with character strength of kindness; and (4) female students have higher levels of sense of school belonging, perceptions of school kindness, and character strength of kindness than male students.

The study found that students’ sense of school belonging was positively correlated with their perceptions of kindness at the school and student levels. At the individual level, as students’ sense of school belonging increased, they were more likely to perceive the school as a fair, caring and kind community.

At the school level, if a school was characterised by a high level of sense of belongingness, it can be predicted that the school tended to be considered as a kind and caring place, where school members helped and cared about each other. The students’ sense of school belonging was positively linked to character strength of kindness at the individual level, but this relationship was found to be non-significant at the school level. At both levels of analysis, the positive relationships between students’ perceptions of school kindness and character strength of kindness were significant. In addition, girls reported higher levels of character strength of kindness than boys.

The study was co-conducted with Professor John Lee Chi-kin, Chair Professor of Curriculum and Instruction. It provided a better understanding of the relationships between students’ sense of school belonging, perceptions of school kindness, and character strength of kindness.

A population health survey in Hong Kong revealed that 50% of people aged 15 to 84 were either overweight or obese because of insufficient intake of wholegrains, fruits, and vegetables, and the increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened and alcoholic beverages, convenience foods, take-out food, and other high-density, low-nutrient foods.

The research by Dr Louisa Chung Ming-yan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Health and Physical Education, The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), found that public education to promote awareness of healthy eating and transferring knowledge about balanced diets has played a pivotal role in positively changing people’s eating behaviour in Hong Kong.

Younger adults, however, are found to lack skills in planning, purchasing, preparing, and cooking healthy meals at home, and tend to select nutritionally-inadequate pre-packaged foods. Establishing healthy eating habits is considered to be a sustainable strategy for good health maintenance, and mobile apps are expected to be a highly effective way to promote healthy eating among young adults. But there are few interventions that apply apps to improve younger adults’ nutrition behaviour.

In this study, a dietary monitoring mobile app, called the “eDietary Portal” (the App), integrated with behavioural feedback, was evaluated in people aged 19 to 39. The primary aim was to investigate the effectiveness of the App in improving the nutrition knowledge and dietary habits of younger adults by increasing the consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and decreasing the consumption of salt and sugar.

Both the experimental group and the control group were given a three-hour nutrition seminar, but the experimental group also underwent 12 weeks of dietary monitoring with the App. Behavioural feedback delivered by the App was evaluated to facilitate the transfer of nutritional knowledge to nutrition behaviour. Baseline and post-intervention nutrition knowledge and dietary behaviour were collected. All mean scores of post-GNKQ-R increased from the baseline for both the control and experimental groups.

The study found that both the control group and the experimental group improved their nutrition knowledge, thanks to the seminar, but the App encouraged dietary reflection, making the experimental subjects more capable of matching food products to food categories, choosing healthy foods, and selecting foods to reduce health problems and the risk of disease.

Both the control group and the experimental group increased their intake of dietary fibre, whole grains, and fruits and vegetables, but the increase was greater in the experimental group, particularly fruit and vegetable consumption. The experimental group reduced sugar consumption more than the control group, but the difference in salt consumption was insignificant. Larger individuals in the experimental group were more likely to increase fruit consumption.

The research concluded that the integration of knowledge transfer about healthy eating with a mobile app is essential for technology-immersed young people. Healthy eating promotion conducted with appropriate technology apps can help users to acquire information flexibly in terms of time, pace, and place, can be adapted to individual needs, and allows reflection by users.

To learn more about the study, please click here.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are toxic organic pollutants, which are usually deposited in soil and marine sediments through petroleum contamination, fossil fuel burning, fallout from air pollution, and terrestrial runoff. The dietary intake of contaminated food is considered to be one of the major sources of total human exposure to PAHs.

Previous studies revealed that concentrations of PAHs in human blood plasma collected from Hong Kong residents were positively correlated with consumption of seafood, including fish, which is a major source of protein in Hong Kong. The contamination of PAHs in farmed fish depends partly on the quality of feed. Fish meal and fish oil are commonly used in fish feed, but they are also a source of organic pollutants, including PAHs. Formulated feeds have become the major diet of many important farmed species.

In 2018, Hong Kong produced 3,600 tonnes of food waste per day, which accounted for one third of municipal solid waste sent to landfill. Food waste is a possible replacement of fish meal to produce safe and quality aquatic products. Recycling food waste for fish feed will also reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills.

Dr Man Yu-bon, Assistant Professor at the Department of Science and Environmental Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, and the research team found that PAH concentrations in all the fish species fed a food waste-based diet were all below the local and international maximum permissible levels, so there was no health risk for human consumption.

The researchers hypothesised that food waste could replace part of fish meal to lower PAHs in fish. The major objectives of the study were to (1) investigate the concentrations of PAHs in food waste used as fish feeds, and (2) assess potential human health risks based on PAH concentrations in the fish meat.

Two farmed freshwater fish species, Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) and jade perch (Scortum barcoo) were fed food waste-based diets (experimental diet) and compared with fish on a commercial formulated control diet (control diet) for a period of six months. Sixteen priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the diets and cultured fish meat were tested by gas chromatographyemass spectrometry.

No significant differences in PAHs were observed between two fish species fed with the experimental diet and the control diet (p > 0.05). However, there was a significantly higher concentration of PAHs in market fish compared with the same species of fish on the experimental diet (p < 0.05). Thus, the experimental diet has the potential to lower the PAH concentration in farmed fish compared to market fish.

A human health risk assessment based on the PAH concentration found there were no non-cancer risks and very low cancer risks from consuming fish fed the experimental diet. In general, the fish fed with the experimental diet were unlikely to cause adverse health effects. There is therefore great potential for using food waste-based diets as an alternative to commercial feeds for cultivating freshwater fish, while also reducing pressure on Hong Kong landfills.

To learn more about the study, please click here.