Frederick Koon Shing Leung

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Faculty of Education

As mathematics anxiety could result in students’ low performance and impact their well-being, it is necessary for both researchers and educators to understand what causes mathematics anxiety and what moderates these effects. Based on the control-value theory, the present study proposed a framework that students’ mathematics anxiety was triggered by...

How do the temporal dynamics of neural activity encode highly coordinated visual-motor behaviour? To capture the millisecond-resolved neural activations associated with fine visual-motor skills, we devised a co-registration system to simultaneously record electroencephalogram and handwriting kinematics while participants were performing four handwr...

This study examined the relationships among cultural values, goal orientations, and mathematics achievement in mainland China. Structural equation models were used to analyze data on 350 Grade 5 students. The results showed that mathematics achievement was positively related to family-support and mastery goal orientations and negatively related to...

In the past three decades, there has been increased attention on the influence of culture on the teaching and learning of mathematics. Jews and Chinese both have a long history and a rich cultural heritage, and the populations in both communities are known to place high emphasis on education. Has this emphasis anything to do with the cultural herit...

China has been implementing mathematics curriculum reform driven by “subject competencies,” and the Chinese term used for competencies is he-xin-su-yang, often translated as “core competency.” In this commentary chapter, concepts related to he-xin-su-yang are discussed. The concept of “core” (he-xin) competencies addresses not only the issue of “wh...

This book documents ongoing research and theorizing in the sub-field of mathematics education devoted to the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling and applications. Mathematical modelling provides a way of conceiving and resolving problems in people’s everyday lives as well as sophisticated new problems for society at large. Mathematical...

The title of this book is Mathematical ModellingMathematical modellingEducation in West and East, arising from the ICTMA-19 conference with the same theme. It is argued that since both mathematics itself and mathematics education are human products, and solving problems in real-life context is at the heart of mathematical modellingMathematical mode...

The importance of integrating history into mathematics education is widely recognised in the literature and advocated in curricula worldwide, including in China. However, under the influence of the long-standing centrally designed curricula, teachers in China are accustomed to content- and teacher-centred examination-driven teaching practices. Adop...

Students' affective characteristics have been confirmed to shape their mathematics learning outcomes, including problem-solving performance and mathematics achievement. However, it remains unclear whether affect influences student mathematical problem posing-a process closely related to mathematical problem solving. Drawn from the expectancy-value...

This study compared the relationships between the goal orientations, learning strategies, and mathematics achievement of Chinese Miao and Han students. A total of 211 Han and 321 Miao fifth‐ and sixth‐grade students from Qiandongnan participated in the study. The results suggest that, in both samples, mastery orientation positively predicted the us...

In 2017, the University of Hong Kong and the University of California San Diego co-hosted the first Asian meeting of the recently formed Asia Pacific Research Integrity (APRI) network in Hong Kong. Aligned with planning meetings in 2015 and 2016 funded in part by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the Hong Kong meeting was designed by a mul...

Research Findings: This study employed data from the TIMSS 2015 survey to investigate whether parental educational involvement behaviour in early childhood and parental attitudes towards education can enhance children’s mathematics achievement in the 4th grade via influencing children’s learning interests. Samples from Singapore (N=6237) and Hong K...

Although mentoring has been considered to be important for beginning teachers to situate themselves within the school community, only a few studies on the opportunities of mentoring and possible difficulties from the perceptions of the mentee have been carried out, especially in East Asia. In this paper, a study based on a multiple case approach th...

Research on impact of teacher beliefs on their practices has been recognized as one of the important aspects in the discipline of mathematics education. This study reports the results of a case study that gives an insight about the influence of professed beliefs of pre-service secondary mathematics teachers on their instructional practices in the S...

Research on educational borrowing has been largely concerned with debates on the complexity of transferring educational models and approaches from one culture to another. This study aims to understand the issues involved in the adoption of a Dutch approach to mathematics instruction, Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), in Indonesian culture. The...

This study reports the findings of a study which investigated junior secondary school students’ conceptions of and approaches to learning mathematics and their relationships in Mainland China. Two questionnaires, conceptions of learning mathematics (COLM) and approaches to learning mathematics (ALM), were administered to 1590 students. Descriptive...

In recent years, there is an interest of studies emphasising on the importance of values in mathematics education (Bishop 1999; Macnab 2000; Pa 2009). This study focuses on teachers’ values and valuing process within the context of lesson study in school settings. By aligning the lesson study process with Raths et al. (1987) valuing process framewo...

While East Asian students have consistently achieved extraordinary science achievement, they demonstrated below-average attitudes towards science. It was unclear what the associations are among attitudes toward science, and influences from school, family, and student themselves. By analyzing a sample of 3600 fourth-graders from 132 Hong Kong school...

The results of international large-scale assessments have shown that countries vary considerably in their mathematics performance. Culture has been suggested as a possible cause for the national difference, but insufficient empirical research has been conducted to investigate the effect of culture on mathematics achievement. Based on Hofstede’s con...

This study investigated the influential factors on Hong Kong students’ attitudes towards science. The sample of 3957 students from 136 schools was analyzed by using the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) database. The results showed that different students-, family, teacher-, and school-related factors had different...

Past studies have raised caution over educational transfer in mathematics education. The idea that an instructional approach to teaching and learning of mathematics can truly be universal and implemented across all cultures was challenged, as some aspects of the approach might be too closely bound up with the specific context where it was developed...

International studies of mathematics achievement have been gaining importance in the past decades in the mathematics education community and have drawn much attention from policy makers around the world. In this chapter, results of some international studies in terms of mathematics achievements, student attitudes and classroom teaching are reviewed...

This book intends to provide a comprehensive introduction to the status of development of Chinese mathematics education in the 21st century. To this end, the book summarizes and presents the research and practices of Chinese mathematics education in the following aspects: (1) characteristics of Chinese school mathematics curriculum and textbooks, (...

This study investigates how teacher background, subject knowledge and pedagogic efficacy affect Grade 4 children’s (aged 9–10) mathematical achievement in 10 primary schools in Hong Kong. Mathematics teachers were selected for their strong commitment to teaching mathematics and their pupils’ consistently high international mathematics performance....

Chinese students’ superior performance in mathematics in various international comparative studies (Fan & Zhu, 2004; OECD, 2010, 2014) has led to an increasing interest in exploring the characteristics of mathematics instruction in China (Fan, Wong, Cai, & Li, 2015; Li & Huang, 2013).

This study investigates how teacher background, subject knowledge and pedagogic efficacy affect Grade 4 children's (aged 9-10) mathematical achievement in 10 primary schools in Hong Kong. Mathematics teachers were selected for their strong commitment to teaching mathematics and their pupils' consistently high international mathematics performance....

Gifted students usually require much less time spent in practising and revising basic skills; instead, they benefit greatly from opportunities to work through the curriculum at a faster pace (acceleration). Teachers currently working with mixed-ability classes do not always find it easy to differentiate their teaching approach in this way, so there...

The Hong Kong Education Bureau recommends that primary school pupils’ mathematical achievement be enhanced via collaborative discussions engendered by group work. This pedagogic change may be hindered by Confucian heritage classroom practices and Western-dominated group work approaches that predominate in Hong Kong. To overcome these obstacles, we...

This paper investigated pre-service mathematics teachers' mathematics beliefs, beliefs about information and communication technology (ICT), and their relationships. 787 pre-service mathematics teachers in China completed a survey questionnaire measuring their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, beliefs about mathematics learning and teaching,...

This chapter reports case studies of three Chinese teachers' mathematics beliefs, espoused as well as enacted, in the context of a constructivism-oriented curriculum reform. Ernest's and Kuhs and Ball's theoretical frameworks of mathematics beliefs were used to guide the design of the instruments and subsequent characterization of the teachers' mat...

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 1999 Video Study aims at describing and comparing eighth-grade mathematics teaching practices among seven countries in order to identify similar or different classroom features. Since East Asian students have consistently performed well in recent international studies of mathematics achi...

Students in East Asia have been performing extremely well in international studies of mathematics achievements such as TIMSS and PISA. On the other hand, education practices in East Asian countries look different from Western practices, and some practices look very backward and contradictory to what are considered as good practices. Given these int...

This chapter discusses two major methodological issues in studying teachers’ beliefs. The two issues are analyzing data on teachers’ beliefs and drawing conclusion on teachers’ beliefs. Furthermore, the authors use a cross-cultural study of teachers’ mathematics beliefs to illustrate the two issues. Suggestions are provided at the end of this chapt...

Education reform is now a worldwide phenomenon, and many countries are interested in the issue of alignment. The mathematics curriculum of the new three-year senior secondary (NSS) curriculum in Hong Kong aims to develop the proficiency of students or learners to think critically and creatively, to inquire and reason mathematically, and to use math...

International studies of mathematics achievement such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and Programme for International Student Assessment have dominated much discussion within the mathematics education community and beyond, but such discussions often do not do justice to the nature of these international studies. In this pap...

When George Bereday, the famous comparative educator from Columbia University in New York (see e.g. Bereday 1964), first heard of the work of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in the early 1960s, he said that the IEA researchers were comparing the incomparable. Perhaps he meant that it was impossible...

This study examined the connection between subject matter knowledge (SMK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) among a group of Chinese pre-service mathematics teachers teaching three-term ratio. Both video-based interview and task-based interview approaches were employed to investigate six pre-service teachers' (PSTs) conceptual understanding o...

The didactic triangle in which the student, the teacher and the content (mathematics) form the vertices of a triangle has been a ‘trivium’ (Goodchild and Sriraman, 2012) used to conceptualize teaching and learning in the mathematics classroom (National Research Council, 2001). Under this conceptualization, the didactic relationship is a ternary one...

Algebra is a major component of the mathematics curriculum in all countries around the world. There is ample research on the algebra curriculum and on algebra teaching reported in the literature, mainly on the importance of algebra (Edwards, 1990; Moses & Cobb, 2001; Kaput, Blanton & Moreno, 2008; National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2008; Watson,...

“Algebra for everyone” has become a slogan of mathematics education reformers (e.g., Edwards, 1990), and the claim that all students will benefit from learning algebra is bolstered by research findings that those who take algebra courses in high school have higher chances to enter prestigious universities and get high-salary jobs (Moses & Cobb, 200...

Utilizing the LPS dataset, Algebra Teaching around the World documents eighth grade algebra teaching across a variety of countries that differ geographically and culturally. Different issues in algebra teaching are reported, and different theories are used to characterize algebra lessons or to compare algebra teaching in different countries. Many c...

This behemoth of a book is 2 ¼ inches wide and 1120 pages long. It has 33 chapters by 84 authors from 26 countries, making it truly international by representation. It is divided into four parts which describe: 1) social, political, and cultural dimension in mathematics education; 2) mathematics education as a field of study; 3) technology in the m...

This paper reports the similarities and differences in how “expert mathematics teacher” is conceptualized by mathematics educators in Hong Kong and Chongqing, two cities in China which share similar but different cultural and social backgrounds. Thirty-seven mathematics education researchers, school principals with mathematics education background,...

This study investigated and compared the mathematics beliefs of junior secondary mathematics teachers and the level of consistency between their beliefs and the constructivist principles underlying the reform - oriented curriculum in Hong Kong and Chongqing. The questionnaire survey involved 113 Hong Kong and 114 Chongqing teachers. At both places,...

Today we take for granted that everybody should be offered the opportunity to learn mathematics. However, it was not until well into the 20th century that “mathematics for all” became an achievable goal. Before then, the geographical location of schools in relation to children’s homes, the availability (or non-availability) of teachers capable of t...

Though it is generally believed that doing homework promotes better learning, no consensus has been achieved concerning its importance and relevance to students’ achievement. The historical up-and-down status of public attitudes toward homework indicates that understanding about the role of homework in students’ learning is far from comprehensive a...

This study investigated the relationship between motor-reduced visual perceptual abilities and visual-motor integration abilities of Chinese learning children by employing the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Hammill, Pearson, & Voress, 1993), in which both abilities are measured in a single test. A total of 72 native Chinese learners of ag...

This paper reports an investigation of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children's general visual perceptual abilities. The Developmental Test of Visual Perception was administered to 41 native Chinese-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 4 mo. in Hong Kong and 35 English-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 2 mo. in Melbourne. Of interest were...

Many studies (such as Pepin in Learners and pedagogy, Sage Publications, London, 1999; Kaiser in ZDM 34(6):241–257, 2002; Park and Leung in Mathematics education in different cultural traditions: a comparative study of East Asia and the West. The 13th ICMI Study, pp. 227–238, Springer, New York, 2006) have revealed that there is a strong dependence...

This paper reports a joint research project by researchers from three countries on an international comparative study that examines the professional knowledge of prospective mathematics teachers in elementary mathematics from an advanced standpoint. For this study, mathematical problems on various topics of elementary mathematical content were deve...

One of the main features of globalization is the increasing mobility of population. As an immigrant society, Hong Kong has witnessed waves of Mainland Chinese arrivals and assimilation into her mainstream, particularly around the change of sovereignty period. School-aged children constitute a substantial fraction of the new population. Given their...

This paper comments on the other papers in this issue related to how “mathematics teaching expertise” is conceptualized and the approaches employed to facilitate its development in Western and Eastern countries. Similarities and differences are found to exist in the conceptualization of mathematics teaching expertise and the development approaches...

The importance of motivation in learning has been widely recognized. However, due to its multidimensional and complex nature, it appears difficult to synthesize research findings on motivation across studies. Heated debates about the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on learning and their interaction have been going on since the terms s...