Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore whether an in-service life teacher training program can improve boarding students’ health, behavior, and academic performance.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial to measure the effect of life teacher training on student health, behavior, and academic performance among 839 boarding students in ten central primary boarding schools in Shaanxi. And the authors also tried to identify why or why not life teacher training works. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis are used in this paper.

Findings – The authors find significant improvements in health and behavior. Specifically, compared to boarding students in control schools, 15 percent fewer students in treatment schools reported feeling cold while sleeping at night. The results also showed that student tardiness and misbehaviors after class declined significantly by 18 and 78 percent, respectively. However, the in-service life teacher training program had no measurable impact on boarding students’ BMI-for-age Z-score, number of misbehaviors in class, and academic performance. The analysis suggests that improved communication between life teachers and students might be one mechanism behind these results.

Originality/value – This is the first empirical work which explored how to improve the welfare of boarding students via their life teachers. Because of the sudden increase in boarding students in rural China, it is almost certain that school personnel lack experience in managing boarding students. As such, one promising approach to improving student outcomes might be in-service training for life teachers.

We estimate the effects of attending the first versus second-tier of higher education institutions on Chinese students’ at-college and expected post-college outcomes using various quasi-experimental methods such as regression discontinuity, genetic matching, and regression discontinuity controlling for covariates. Overall we find that just attending the first versus second-tier makes little difference in terms of students’ class ranking, net tuition, expected wages, or likelihood of applying for graduate school. The results do show, however, that just attending the first versus second tier makes it less likely that students will get their preferred major choice.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the factors (access, attendance and quality of preschools) that may be affecting the educational readiness of China’s rural children before they enter the formal school system. Using data from a survey of 80 preschools and 500 households in 6 counties in 3 provinces of China, this paper documents the nature of early childhood education (ECE) services and the educational readiness of children aged 4-5 in rural China. We present evidence that ECE services are seriously deficient. Households in many areas of rural China do not have convenient access to preschool facilities. Preschools have poor facilities, inadequate health services, and little concern for the nutrition of their students. Most teachers have little formal training. In part due (perhaps) to the poor quality and low participation in preschool, in this paper we will show that China's rural children score much lower on standardized educational readiness tests. In fact, according to our findings, more than one half of the rural children in our sample are “not ready” for continuing into the next level of formal education. Our analysis implies that it is necessary to improve the facilities and quality of teachers and to increase the probability that children will be sent to ECE institution.

Many educational systems have struggled with the question about how best to give out financial aid. In particular, if students do not know the amount of financial aid that they are receive before they make a decision about where to go to college and what major to study, it may distort their decision. This study utilizes an experiment (implemented by ourselves as a Randomized Control Trial) to analyze whether or not an alternative way of providing financial aid--by providing an early commitment on financial aid during the student's senior year of high school instead of after entering college--affects the college decision making of poor students in rural China. We find that if early commitments are made early enough; and they are large enough, students will make less distorting college decisions.

Although universities have expanded in size, it is unclear if the poor have benefited. If there are high returns to college education, then increasing access of the poor to college has important welfare implications. The objective of this paper is to document the rates of enrollment into college of the poor and to identify the hurdles to doing so. Relying on several sets of data, including a survey of college students from universities in three poor provinces in China, we have found that the college matriculation rate of the poor is substantially lower than students from non-poor families; the same is true for rural women and minorities. Clearly, there are barriers that are keeping the rural poor out. The paper also demonstrates that the real hurdles are not during the years of secondary schooling or at the time of admissions to college. The real impediments keeping the rural poor from pursuing a college education arise long before high school—as early as preschool and elementary school years—and are present throughout the entire schooling system.

Impact evaluation has become an increasingly integral part of development project design and execution in recent years. Many questions remain, however, about what methods yield the most compelling evaluations, and how best to implement them. The Rural Education Action Project (REAP) is among the most successful impact evaluation groups currently operating in China. The goal of this paper is to share five practical strategies that REAP has employed to maximize the effectiveness of our impact evaluations. These strategies include the use of randomization and other experimental and quasi experimental research designs; pursuit of local and international collaboration; strict attention to policy relevance; a modular, incremental research approach; and robust outreach. 

The overall goal of this paper is to try to understand in the context China’s middle school education system what is the tradeoff between community service and educational performance. In addition, we seek to understand some of the other effects of participation in community service activities. When students participate in community service, does their self-esteem rise and/or self-efficacy rise? Finally, we also want to know if students participate in community service activities will their sense of social responsibility rise.

Because the nature of this question is so broad we must necessarily reduce the scope of the paper. To do so, we study a community service program funded and run by a private US foundation in 592 junior high and high school classes in two counties in Shaanxi province. While we understand that there are many institutional and pedagogical issues that will affect the relationship among community service, grades and a sense of social responsibility (e.g., citation), we will focus our efforts on empirically evaluating the linkages. We also recognize that by focusing on the activities of an NGO in a single part of China that many of the findings will be affected by the context of the program. However, we also believe that we may be able to observe and measure more fundamental behavioral relationships. At the very least we seek to provide rigorous, statistically-based evidence from a case study which hopefully can be combined with other work to help us more fully understand community service, social responsibility and educational performance.

The education of the disadvantaged population has been a long-standing challenge to education systems in both developed and developing countries. Although computer-assisted learning (CAL) has been considered one alternative to improve learning outcomes in a cost-effective way, the empirical evidence of its impacts on improving learning outcomes is mixed. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to explore the effects of CAL on student academic and non-academic outcomes for students in migrant schools in Beijing. Our results show that a remedial CAL program held out of regular school hours improved the student standardized math scores by 0.15 standard deviations and most of the program effect took place within 2 months after the start of the program. Students with less-educated parents benefited more from the program. Moreover, CAL also significantly increased the students’ interest in learning