Research and expertise

What the Department of Psychology works on, and who to speak to.

A researcher working with a parent and child in the Department child study room

How we work

Psychology in a Faculty of Education has to earn its keep twice over: once as a discipline, and once in the schools, clinics and homes where its findings are put to work. The Department deliberately holds both ends. Our staff run controlled studies in the child study rooms on campus, and they also spend term time in partner schools, sitting with teachers and educational psychologists over the same child, the same reading difficulty, the same difficult term.

Most of our projects are designed with the schools and families who take part in them, and we report what we find whether or not it supports the intervention being trialled. Where a study produces something a teacher can use on Monday morning, we write that version too.

Research across the Faculty

Our research areas

Developmental psychology

How children and young people change, and what makes the difference. Current work covers early social and emotional development, self-regulation, peer relationships and the transition from primary to secondary schooling. We follow cohorts of Hong Kong children over several years rather than testing them once, because most of the questions worth asking are questions about change.

Educational and school psychology

Psychology as it is practised inside a school. We study how referrals are made, how support is planned and reviewed, and what happens to a recommendation once it reaches a busy classroom. Staff supervise trainee educational psychologists on placement and work with school teams on tiered support, behaviour planning and the use of assessment data.

Cognitive and learning sciences

Memory, attention, language processing and the reading of Chinese and English by bilingual learners. Our laboratory work on how children decode, remember and retrieve feeds directly into classroom research on spacing, retrieval practice and the design of learning materials for Hong Kong classrooms.

Counselling and mental health

Adolescent wellbeing, help-seeking and school-based mental health support. We evaluate guidance and counselling programmes running in local secondary schools, study the pressures particular to the Hong Kong senior secondary years, and work with school social workers and counsellors on what can realistically be delivered in a school week.

Psychological assessment and measurement

The instruments themselves. We adapt and validate cognitive, behavioural and wellbeing measures for Cantonese-speaking children and families, and study how assessment results are read and acted upon by the teachers and parents who receive them. Sound measurement is unglamorous work, and everything else in the Department depends on it.