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. 

In this paper, we attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of reading programs at improving the reading skills and academic achievement of primary school students in rural China. Using survey data on 4108 students, we find that students exhibited low levels of reading achievement, independent reading quantity, and reading confidence in the absence of any treatment. However, our results also suggest that properly designed treatments may improve the reading and academic outcomes of students. Specifically, we found that increased access to independent reading materials coupled with effective teacher training led to significant improvements in student reading skills, math test scores, and Chinese test scores. We believe that these improvements are due to changes in reading instruction and the attitudes of teachers toward reading. These findings indicate that encouraging higher reading quantity and providing high-quality reading instruction are important components for programs that seek to improve student outcomes in developing country settings.

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that village cadres, who are the lowest level of administrators in rural areas, exploit personal political status for economic gain. Much existing research, however, compares the earnings of cadre and non-cadre households in rural China without controlling for unobserved dimensions of ability that are also correlated with success as entrepreneurs or in non-agricultural activities. The findings of this paper suggest a measurable return to cadre status, but the magnitudes are not large and provide only a modest incentive to participate in village-level public administration. The paper does not find evidence that households of village cadres earn significant rents from having a family member who is a cadre. Given the increasing return to non-agricultural employment since China’s economic reforms began, it is not surprising that the return to working as a village cadre has also increased over time. Returns to cadre-status (such as they are) are derived both from direct compensation and subsidies for cadres and indirectly through returns earned in offfarm employment from businesses and economic activities managed by villages

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a high profile initiative to narrow the inequality of access to ICT and improve educational performance. However, there is little empirical evidence on its impacts. In order to assess the effectiveness of OLPC, we conducted a randomized experiment of OLPC with Chinese characteristics involving 300 third-grade students in Beijing migrant schools. Our results show that the program improved student computer skills by 0.33 standard deviations and math scores by 0.17 standard deviations. The program also increased student time spent using educational software and decreased student time spent watching TV. Student selfesteem also improved.

We report on the results of a randomised controlled trial conducted among over 2,000 children in 60 elementary schools in rural Shaanxi Province, North-west China. We find that providing children with daily iron supplements for six months improved children’s haemoglobin levels and standardised maths scores. In comparison, educating parents about nutrition and anaemia in a special parents meeting produced a modest impact on children’s haemoglobin levels. We also find heterogeneous intervention effects by children’s gender, anaemia status and boarding status. Overall, iron supplementation is more effective. However, given its low cost and simple implementation, parental education should still be considered.

The education of poor and disadvantaged populations, particularly those from minority subgroups, has been a long-standing challenge to education systems in both developed and developing countries (e.g., World Bank 2001, 2004; Glewwe and Kremer 2006; Planty et al. 2008). For example, over the past decade in the United States the high school dropout rate of Hispanic students has remained at least twice as high as that of white students (Aud et al. 2011). Using data from the German Microzensus and the German Socio-Economic Panel, Alba, Handl, and Müller (1994) found that, relative to young Germans with identical sociodemographic characteristics, Italian, Turkish, and Yugoslav children are overrepresented in the lowest academic track of the German school system.

Using individual data collected in rural China and adopting Heckman’s two-step function, we examined the impact of childcare and eldercare on laborers’ off-farm activities. Our study finds that having school-aged children has a negative impact on rural laborers’ migration decisions and a positive impact on their decision to work in the local off-farm employment market. As grandparents can help to take care of young children, the impact of preschoolers is insignificant. Having elderly family to care for decreases the income earned by female members of the family. Although both men and women are actively engaged in off-farm employment today in rural China, this study shows that women are still the primary care providers for both children and the elderly. Therefore, reforming public school enrollment and high school/college entrance examination systems so that migrant children can stay with their parents, this will help rural laborers to migrate to cities. The present study also calls for more public services for preschoolers and the elderly in rural China.

China’s rapid development and urbanization over the past 30 years have caused large numbers of rural residents to migrate to urban areas in search of work. This has created a generation of children who remain behind in rural areas when their parents migrate for work. Previous research has found mixed impacts of parental migration on the educational achievement of left-behind children (LBC), perhaps because of methodological deficiencies and lack of recognition of the heterogeneity of this population of children. Our study attempts to examine the impact of six types of parental migration on the academic achievement of a rural junior high school sample. Our study uses a panel of 7148 junior high school students to implement a difference-in-difference analysis and finds that parental migration has a negative and significant impact on the academic achievement of junior high school students. Our study suggests that the Chinese Government should implement measures to dismantle barriers to the human capital accumulation of LBC to ensure sustainable economic growth and human capital development in China.

This article explores the problem of cognitive delays among toddlers in rural China and the role of their caregivers in producing low levels of cognition (i.e., low IQ). According to the results of a well-tested international scale of child development, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID), cognitive delays are alarmingly common, and nearly half the toddlers in our sample score an IQ of less than 84 on the BSID test (more than one standard deviation below the mean). In analyzing the source of this, we find that poor parenting—for example, not reading to, singing with, or engaging in stimulating play with one’s children—is closely associated with these delays. Even though mothers (as opposed to grandmother caregivers), and especially more educated mothers, are more likely to follow good parenting practices, quality parenting is rare overall. We seek to find out why so many young children appear to be neglected when it comes to modern parenting practices. We empirically rule out the hypotheses that caregivers discriminate according to their child’s gender; that the number of children in a given household is associated with the quality of parenting; or that caregivers living in relative poverty parent differently than their wealthier counterparts. According to the qualitative component of our study, we also find that inadequate parenting does not stem from parental indifference. Parents and grandparents obviously love their children and want them to succeed in life. Instead, the barriers appear to be primarily a lack of time and an absence of knowledge about the importance of good parenting practices. As a result, when they grow up, these children may not possess the levels of cognition needed to thrive in China’s increasingly high-skill-based economy. Overall, our findings suggest that China may be facing a national crisis due to inadequate rural early childhood development.