Teachers' instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an…

This paper is focused on an innovation which involved students being assessed on short written responses to an issue to be addressed in the following classroom session. The innovation was evaluated through a student survey, individual and focus-group interviews with participants, and the analysis of a critical friend. Positive findings included…

This paper reports the findings from the interview data of a research aiming at studying how to trigger students' situational interest in physics and its implications on learning and teaching in the New Senior Secondary (NSS) physics curriculum. 49 students from a boys' school were invited to write one to three learning experiences in physics that…

Teachers in Hong Kong have faced constant demand for practice renewal due to successive waves of educational reforms in the past decade. This paper describes the design of an assignment structure that promotes teacher reflection on important issues related to a major education reform in Hong Kong. This particular assignment structure includes…

Reporting a case study of two high-achieving Chinese students studying at a university in Hong Kong, this paper presents evidence that poses an anti-thesis to the stereotypes of first year university students as holding naïve beliefs about learning and of "Chinese learners" as lacking in critical thinking. Many studies have examined…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…

With the Internet-evoked paradigm shift in the academy, there has been a growing interest in students' Web-based information-seeking and source-use practices. Nevertheless, little is known as to how individual students go about searching for sources online and selecting source material for writing particular assignments. This exploratory study…