Reading is the heart of the education mission in most countries in the world. In North America and Europe, reading is considered one of the key skills that forms the foundation of learning and performance for almost every other subject, including math, writing and science.
In November and December of this year, REAP researchers are working with our partners at the Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE) to teach a 5-week intensive graduate course on impact evaluation at Shaanxi Normal University. CEEE aims to raise the quality and effectiveness of education policy and projects throughout China by not only conducting actionable research, but also educating the next generation of scholars on the importance of evidence-based action and the core principles and methodology of impact evaluation. Founded in January of 2014, CEEE has successfully established a new department of Experimental Economics in Education--with 24 Master's students and 3 PhD students in its first class of students--at Shaanxi Normal University, and will be expanding enrollment at this same rate over the next two years. This intensive course on impact evaluation forms a core part of the curriculum for these students, and also attracted a number of students from REAP partner institutions across China.
Taught by REAP faculty, this graduate course covers all aspects of impact evaluation, from statistics and STATA to project design and randomization. Launching this course marks a significant step forward in REAP's efforts to expand quality impact evaluation in China, thereby contributing to REAP's overarching goal of using evidence-based research to bring about effective and cost-efficient education policies and programs for the benefit of rural China's children.
Junior high dropout rates are up to 25% in poor, rural areas of China. Although existing studies have examined how factors such as high tuition and opportunity costs contribute to dropout, fewer studies have explored the relationship between dropout rates and mental health in rural China. The overall goal of this study is to examine the relationship between dropout and mental health problems in rural Chinese junior high schools. Correlational analysis was conducted among 4,840 students across 38 junior high schools in rural China. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions were used to determine the types of students most at risk for mental health problems and whether mental health problems are correlated with dropout behavior. Our measure for mental health is based on the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale. Mental health problems are widespread in the sample of rural children, with 74% of students at risk for mental health problems. The student and family characteristics that correlate with dropout (poverty and low achievement) also correlate with mental health problems. More importantly, even after controlling for these background characteristics, mental health problems remain correlated with dropout rates. Mental health problems, especially among low-achieving poor students, may be contributing to the high dropout rates in rural China today. This finding suggests that interventions focusing on mental health in rural areas may also help reduce dropout.
About IEI: The International Education Initiative (IEI) is a cross-campus collaboration between FSI and the GSE. The purpose of IEI is to promote greater collaboration around research and policy analysis in international education at Stanford. The initiative includes a speaker series as well as a series of workshops targeted at graduate students and young researchers.
About the Topic: Cost-effectiveness analysis is being used increasingly in education to compare the efficiency of different approaches to gaining educational results. This presentation will provide a brief introduction to the purpose and method of cost-effectiveness analysis in education. It will also provide illustrations of recent work. The main focus will be to address a range of challenges that arise in carrying out these studies. These will include the problem of using retrospective data, issues of outcomes that are not strictly comparable, and multi-site results.
About the Speaker: Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, a nonpartisan entity. He is also the David Jacks Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Economics at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is a specialist in the economics of education and human resources and has published 16 books and almost 300 articles on these and related subjects. At present Levin is doing research on educational reform, educational vouchers, cost-effectiveness analysis, financing educational equity, and educational privatization.
Sponsored by:
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Graduate School of Education, Rural Education Action Program, Center for Education Policy Analysis
Followed by wine and cheese.
Open to the public.
From October 19th to 22nd, REAP's partner at Shaanxi Normal University, the Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE), held a conference gathering representatives from 10 universities across China and more than 20 foundations, NGOs, and government education departments to exchange experiences regarding education development programs and impact evaluation in China. Founded in January of 2014, CEEE aims to raise the quality and effectiveness of education policy and projects throughout China not only by conducting action research, but also by leading training sessions to help other academic research teams, government officials, and NGO and foundation members understand the importance of evidence-based action and the core principles and basic methodology of impact evaluation.
During the conference, CEEE led the participants through a comprehensive training in impact evaluation and provided a forum for participants to share their own diverse experiences in the field of education development. Participants also visited a field site for one of REAP's Computer Assisted Learning projects in order to understand how impact evaluation is conducted in the field. Recalling the four day conference, one participant said, "Before, we all went out to look for the disease believing we already had the prescription in hand. Now we finally understand how to analyze the causal chain underlying a problem in order to find a real solution."
The first in a series of workshops, this conference marks a step forward in REAP's overarching goal to promote evidence-based action in China and bring about effective and cost-efficient education policies and programs for the benefit of rural China's children.
Read more (in Chinese) here.
China Education Daily, a national newspaper published by the Department of Education with daily readership in the millions, published a feature article highlighting REAP research on teacher performance pay structures in rural China. The article rapidly caught the attention of policymakers and educators across China and was widely circulated on a number of China's largest news media websites.
What is teacher performance pay, and why does it matter? Students in rural schools in China are falling behind. Much of the burden for why students from China’s rural schools perform poorly may fall on teachers, as studies from both developed and developing countries, including China, consistently show that teachers are one of the (if not the) most important factors affecting student achievement. Despite their importance, teachers in rural schools in China often lack strong incentives to help students--especially lower-achieving students--learn. Surprisingly, almost nothing is known about how to incentivize teachers in rural China to help their students. "Performance pay" is designed to address this problem by providing contracts to teachers that tie their pay to students test scores, with the goal of raising teacher quality and ultimately student achievement.
The Chinese government is also highly interested in addressing this problem, and in 2009 launched the Teacher Performance Pay Policy asking schools to implement teacher performance pay. However, in 2012 REAP researchers found that 46% of rural schools still had not implemented teacher incentive programs, and in most cases teacher incentive programs that were in place did not lead to improved student achievement.
Therefore, REAP researchers designed an intervention to test three different teacher incentive designs, with the goal of identifying which scheme boosted student achievement the most. The "Pay-for-Percentile" design, which rewarded teachers for focusing on low-achieving students in addition to high-achievers--and thereby differs sharply from most incentive schemes that have been implemented in China--generated remarkable improvements in overall student test scores (learn more about the project here). These results have significant implications for how to raise the quality of schooling across China.
Read the full article (in Chinese) here, or see the English translation below.
An article published in Caixin Online (in Chinese) on March 28, 2014, features REAP research on how to improve high school enrollment rates in rural China.
Yi Hongmei, an assistant professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and researcher with REAP, found that in China's poor rural areas, 63 percent of high school students are not receiving a complete high school education. Yi Hongmei identifies four major causes leading to the high dropout rate: high tuition costs in Chinese high schools; rising opportunity costs of attending high school associated with rapidly increasing wages in the labor market; a lack of academic planning and guidance for high school students; and students with lower scores giving up on their education due to the competitive nature of the Chinese education system.
Yi Hongmei found that both subsidizing high school tuition for poor students and offering conditional cash transfers to students who stayed in school effectively lowered the high school drop out rate, whereas training students in academic and career planning was not an effective means to do so. Furthermore, solving the problem of secondary education in rural China will also require improving vocational schools, which, despite their growing popularity in China, have very low quality in many rural areas.
Read more here
There is a great degree of heterogeneity among the studies that investigate whether computer technologies improve education and how students benefit from them – if at all. The overall goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of computing technologies to raise educational performance and non-cognitive outcomes and identify what program components are most effective in doing so. To achieve this aim we pool the data sets of five separate studies about computer technology programs that include observations of 16,856 students from 171 primary schools across three provinces in China. We find that overall computing technologies have positive and significant impacts on student academic achievement in both math and in Chinese. The programs are found to be more effective if they are implemented out-of-school, avoiding what appear to be substitution effects when programs are run during school. The programs also have heterogeneous effects by gender. Specifically, boys gain more than girls in Chinese. We did not find heterogeneous effects by student initial achievement levels. We also found that the programs that help students learn math—but not Chinese—have positive impacts on student self-efficacy.
Objective: To study for the first time using a clinical trial the effect of free glasses on academic performance in rural Chinese children, among whom uncorrected myopia is the leading cause of visual impairment.
Participants: Among 19,934 children in grades 4 and 5 randomly selected for visual acuity screening, 3177 (15.9%, mean age 10.5 years) had visual acuity < 6/12 in either eye without glasses correctable to > 6/12 with glasses, and were eligible for allocation. Among these, 3052 (96.0%) completed the study.
Interventions: Children were randomized by school (84 schools per arm) to one of three interventions at the beginning of the school year: free glasses provided in class, vouchers for free glasses at a local facility or glasses prescriptions only (Control group).
Results: Among 3177 eligible children, 1036 (32.6%), 988 (31.1%) and 1153 (36.3%) were randomized to Control, Voucher and Free Glasses respectively. All eligible children would benefit from glasses, but only 15% had them at baseline. Intention-to-treat analyses were performed on all 1002 (96.8%), 946 (95.9%) and 1104 (95.8%) children completing final testing in Control, Voucher and Free Glasses groups. Effect on test score was 0.11 SD (95% Confidence Interval [CI] 0.01 to 0.21, p = 0.03) comparing the Free Glasses and Control groups. Adjusted effect of providing free glasses (0.10 SD, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.20; p = 0.04) was greater than parental education (0.03, 95% CI -0.03 to 0.10) or family wealth (0.002, 95% CI -0.07 to 0.07). Closeout glasses wear was 41% (observed), 68% (self-reported) in the Free Glasses group.
Conclusions: Providing free glasses improves children's performance on mathematics testing to a statistically significant degree, despite imperfect compliance. Myopia is common and rarely corrected in this setting.
