Education of poor and disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge for education systems in both developed and developing countries. In China, millions of students in rural areas and migrant communities lag far behind their urban counterparts in terms of academic achievement. When they fall behind, they often have no way to catch up. Many of their parents have neither the skills nor the money to provide remedial tutoring; rural teachers often do not have time to give students the individual attention they need. Given this, there is growing interest by both educators and policymakers in helping underperforming students catch up using computer assisted learning (CAL). While CAL interventions have been shown to be effective internationally and elsewhere in China, traditional software-based CAL programs are difficult and costly to implement. An online version of CAL (OCAL), however, may be able to bypass many of offline CAL’s implementation problems and enhance the remedial tutoring experience. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence on whether OCAL programs can be effective in improving the quality of rural primary school education in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of an OCAL intervention on the academic and non-academic performance of students and to explore the mechanism behind OCAL’s impact. Importantly, we also aim to assess the cost effectiveness of the new OCAL program versus traditional CAL interventions. To achieve these objectives, we carried out a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 1650 fifth grade students in 44 schools in rural areas and migrant communities across China. Students in the 22 treatment schools attended two 40- minute OCAL sessions during their computer class each week for one semester; the students in the other 22 schools were in the control group and did not receive any intervention. According to our findings, OCAL improved overall English scores of students in the treatment group relative to the control group by 0.56 standard deviations. This impact is large when compared with offline CAL programs. We found that OCAL also led to a positive change in the attitudes of students towards English learning and towards student aspirations for their future education level. We found three possible explanations for OCAL’s impact. After rejecting the possibility of the Hawthorne Effect or self-efficacy-induced changes, we believe interest-oriented stimulation is the main source of improvement among students. The chance for comparison and competition with peers, as well as customized remedial question banks tailored to each student’s individual needs, likely contributed to the measured increases in academic performance among students in our sample. Cost-effectiveness analysis showed that the OCAL program is more cost-effective than traditional offline CAL, a comparison which is significant for policymakers as it indicates high potential for OCAL program expansion. 

This paper reports on a survey conducted among more than 800 engineering students at elite universities in China and the United States. Results from the survey reveal that US and Chinese students are roughly equivalent in their desire to form or join startup ventures. Far more US students, however, plan on actually doing so. In contrast, Chinese students are more likely to join the state/government sector. Our results also reveal a wide gap in perceptions on the availability of financing, mentorship and other innovation resources. The findings suggest that the innovation ecosystem in China remains underdeveloped in certain important respects.

Can the BRIC university systems greatly increase the quantity of graduates in these developing countries and simultaneously achieve high enough quality to compete successfully at the higher end of the global knowledge economy?

Across the globe, students living in disadvantaged areas (rural, impoverished, remote) and from disadvantaged backgrounds (low income) are less likely than their advantaged counterparts to go to higher levels of schooling. In general, disadvantaged students repeat grades more, drop out more, and on average perform less well academically. They thus face serious challenges in taking advantage of education, an important channel for social mobility, as a means to help them and their households improve their long-term economic well-being. Recognizing this, policy makers and researchers in developing countries have implemented a variety of interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.

A significant gap remains between rural and urban students in the rate of admission to senior high school. One reason for this gap may be the high levels of tuition and fees for senior high school. By reducing student expectations of attending high school, high tuition and fees can reduce student academic performance in junior high school. In this paper we evaluate the impact of a senior high tuition relief program on the test scores of poor, rural seventh grade students in China. We surveyed three counties in Shaanxi Province and exploit the fact that, while the counties are adjacent to one another and share similar characteristics, only one of the three implemented a tuition relief program. Using several alternative estimation strategies, including Difference-in-Differences (DD), Difference-in-Difference-in- Differences (DDD), Propensity Score Matching (Matching) and Difference-in-Differences Matching (DD Matching), we find that the tuition program has a statistically significant and positive impact on the math scores of seventh grade students. More importantly, this program is shown to have a statistically significant and positive effect on the poorest students in the treatment group compared to their wealthier peers.